Knowledge, language & writing

@billbowtell @CrabbBrendan @MarylouiseMcla1 thought this was interesting. Countries who made great play from 'opening up' often also have the highest stringency ratings. Goes to show the lockdown/'live with the virus' binary is false? The…

Superb read from @billbowtell, one of the very few in this pandemic who understood and kept bringing us back to the basic fact. Nature makes viruses, but people and politics make pandemics. (My own two cents - the cause of this pandemic?…

@CrabbBrendan @profmiketoole @billbowtell still copying the UK, first restaurant and entertainment vouchers (NSW), now travel. Targeting highest risk areas for spread, border-busting. Also targeting marginal LNP seats.…

#qanda I think Stan may not have actually read Camus.

@simonahac while I'm also eager to see more electric cars, I think we need a foundational conversation about cars, roads and urban design. Like this one, how roads actually create traffic. A phenomenon agnostic to type of car.…

@Peter_Fitz saw this online and assumed it was a joke. But it may be legit? Probably covered in your book, which I haven't read, oops. https://t.co/e0q0QGhBIC

@EricIdle back to Python being comic writers and actors, rather than comedians...in that sense is "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" actually a great capture of the wider Python project? To highlight the humour of all life, rather…

@ProfPCDoherty thought this was interesting. https://t.co/evvcfqxI7U

@MarylouiseMcla1 thoughts? https://t.co/qwqWJwveOd

@PhillipAdams_1 Ben is a brilliant interview, and his book is a revelation on many fronts. Just sayin' https://t.co/zXQduezuGC

@GidMK methodologically, is all this talk of the risks of various vaccines confusing individual and population risk? Thought this was interesting: https://t.co/xFth2GBAY4 @profmiketoole interested to hear any thoughts from epidemiologists!

If 10 out of a million people get sick, it doesn't mean each person has a 0.0001% chance of getting sick. Some will have a 100% chance, others zero. The public intuitively know this, experts less so? Individual risk is an oxymoron.…

Maybe a mark of how specialised and narrow knowledge now is, that even experts speak constantly about the impact of the pandemic on the Economy. Rather than seeing that what we call the Economy was actually the cause of the pandemic.

@normanswan tweeting this as somebody with training in high-level maths, stats, risk management and ethics. Not a yokel or in any way an anti-vaxxer. I'm concerned about how vaccine risk and hesitancy is being described in public debate.…

I think there's plenty of that going on. There are others too though who think the risk is being misrepresented. And who also think the vaccines are being used to evade the basic public health work.

If you think (as I do) that Church vs State defines all politics, going back centuries, then today's trending Tweets will make you nod. https://t.co/fcQfnKhqO6

@billbowtell it was partly your work that inspired this thread. https://t.co/Ps4B5Pg14Z

#covid19 #auspol it's incredibly difficult to challenge the public narratives around vaccines and risk without being immediately shunted into some loon anti-vaxxer, irrational category. But a few thoughts. 1/n The AZ vaccine repeatedly…

@rajah_mich thought this was interesting, about how in countries with low Covid rates, holding off until other vaccines are available is a sound risk approach? https://t.co/HpRL1T5rKC

@MikeySlezak I know we discussed vaccines and risk a few weeks ago. Population vs individual etc. Had meant to tag you on this one earlier, I think it contextualises risk very well. Rather than just using population risk as a proxy.…

@CrabbBrendan @billbowtell @GregDore2 if you recommend the public to not go out and mix, it's 'proportionate'. But if the government tells them not to, it's a 'lockdown'? Words matter, what on Earth does 'strongly recommend' mean in a…

#covid19 this from John Skerritt, a nice bloke. Economic thinkers have wanted this shift in the public narrative for a year, 'only vaccines will end this pandemic'. They won't, alone, it's a dangerous shift. It excuses us dropping the ball…

#insiders this BS about 'low risk appetite'. Australians don't want the virus. They're smarter than these economic boobs who think getting the rubber ducks rolling back off the production line is 'normal life'.

@MarylouiseMcla1 I was very impressed with this, your thoughts? https://t.co/ENhn3P6Rso

#covid19 #auspol "consent should be a voluntary choice, and should be based on sufficient information and adequate understanding of both the proposed research and the implications of participation in it." From the National Statement on…

#insiders two words that should send a shiver down every ordinary working person's spine. 'Structural reform'.

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

@CrabbBrendan @profmiketoole if mass vaccinations may need to restart as early as September in the US, this suggests the truth of #VaccinesPLUS? That speed of vaccination is a lesser problem now than lack of global focus and control of…

@auspol @annabelcrabb it's a sign of our populist and libertarian times I think that a public passionate about using its public institutions to do what they were designed to do, are described as being in love with 'being told what to do'.…

#auspol #covid19 think I give up on this. The developed world has turned pandemic strategy into some sort of football league of who can vaccinate the fastest. Which in turn prolongs the pandemic because vaccine often isn't going where it's…

#auspol #covid19 @CrabbBrendan all wise words. I sometimes wonder if the pandemic would be as good as over if the world quarantined and vaccinated countries with high viral load and spread. Ring-fence them. As we do for Ebola and other…

#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…

#auspol Racism, paternalism, pandemics. With Ebola outbreaks, the world mobilises to isolate those regions and countries ASAP, to prevent spread. With Covid, the source is rich countries. Now the approach is 'vaccinate the world so our…

#auspol I think we're doing permanent damage to public health attitudes. Don't say 'this is very low risk for everybody'. Say 'most of you will have no effect, some will get very sick'. If you're hesitant to say that, you now understand…

@patientsafe3 #covid19 #auspol when you read the detailed treatment guidelines for VITT, it makes you think AZ should be described as 'safe, except for people whose heads we might have to cut open to try to remove clots'. Saying that's a…

@CrabbBrendan @profmiketoole I haven't seen a better thread confirming the importance of #VaccinesPLUS. https://t.co/2Ni83qxKCf

#auspol #covid19 one of the simplest ways to understand why Melbourne has required more lockdowns than Sydney is to look at the volume of movement in each city. Melbourne much less congested, more movement to restrict to prevent spread.…

#auspol #covid19 I think this sort of messaging is misleading, and undermines longer-term public health programs. It may not be the world's 'ticket out', alone. https://t.co/sblLIYvfew

#auspol everything about this thread makes a mockery of the bizarre shift in pandemic framing in Oz, where you could listen to the news and think we're lagging idiocy like the UK and US, because they're vaccinating quickly.…

#auspol #covid19 first rich countries provide breeding grounds for aggressive variants. Then they spread them through vaccinated travel, and provide fertile ground for further variant evolution by not controlling transmission.…

#auspol #covid19 Oz has reached a point where journalists understanding the politics and not the science, and experts understanding the science and not the politics, has stalled our thinking. 'Hesitancy' is the public sensing this.

#auspol gee, and I thought we were in the middle of a pandemic. This sort of drivel is what the government has been doing while it hasn't been doing quarantine or vaccination planning. https://t.co/gQ8KI8vXDP

@profmiketoole @CrabbBrendan @DrZoeHyde one of the biggies in this interview I think is Drosten's belief that herd immunity is never possible with humans and their mobile societies. That it's a concept inappropriately transferred from…

#auspol @Peter_Fitz this is messy. Haven't read the publication yet, though framing it as hunter-gathering vs farming is a binary I think Gammage's masterwork showed us how to bypass. https://t.co/A4kEKIT4AQ

#auspol #covid smart people need to stand up and smash the idiotic use of the 'hermit kingdom' insult, the 'we need to live with risk' spin from economic thinkers. As if Oz is running away from some more grown-up 'living with Covid'. 1/3…

#auspol #covid19 Sir Richard Barrons, previously Commander Joint Forces Command in the UK, said this before the pandemic. It's why I think the pushback on public health action so often is framed as individual inconvenience. We've had no…

#covid19 #auspol If the developed world pursues travel bubbles, and the virus continues to spread and mutate elsewhere, and dangerous variants develop, watch rich countries demand the locking down of poorer nations. As with Ebola. The…

#auspol #covid19 not a formal statement from the EMA themselves. But seems indicative of a view of top officials within it that AZ vaccination should cease in the EU for all ages? https://t.co/EYqq9Cr5Jc @profmiketoole @CrabbBrendan am I…

#covid19 #auspol viruses spread through social activity. Social activity is governed by political systems and ideas. The seriousness of a pandemic is therefore deeply implicated in the political ideas used to address it. 1/3 The clear…

#auspol interesting how quickly Oz shifted to the inevitability of endemicity, after being so strong on elimination in 2020. Strategic slippage, driven by economic 'live with the virus' thinkers, expert at continuously re-disguising their…

#auspol #covid19 "This race between the vaccines and the virus, it isn't over yet." Matt Hancock. Vaccination is orders of magnitude slower than viral spread. The danger of having a single-pronged pandemic strategy, based on vaccines.…

Climate change. The volume of combustion gases humanity has released into the atmosphere in the past two-and-a-half centuries; I think it hasn't really registered with many the scale of what's occurred. Take the 2019 mega-fires in…

#auspol NSW fires up the gold standard again. I think that may even be a non-N95 mask. https://t.co/wd6DXjIYsM

#auspol I've had first dose AZ, just as context. This isn't a pro-vax/anti-vax question for me, or even pro-AZ/anti-AZ. Twitter turns everything into debating binaries. It's about public health strategy. 1/7 https://t.co/vj7QfwoECO This…

#auspol #covid19 serious question. Do the words 'strongly encouraged' have any meaningful role in public health work? https://t.co/ggwDIa2TWC

#auspol no means no. First rule of consent. Sexual or medical. Vaccine 'hesitancy' isn't an ignorant public. It's a public having reasons for resisting something, and those reasons not being listened to. Their risk assessment is actually…

#auspol and yet, somebody will be that 1 person. That's what the public is thinking. "Not me". It's not likely to be them (one half of risk), but if it is them, it's game over (other half of risk). https://t.co/wJFqJmh2ev

#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…

#COVID19Aus @CrabbBrendan very disappointed to hear yet another Oz expert on radio tonight say that we need to move away from 'zero Covid' and accept that we will have some virus in Australia. That IS zero Covid. We're already 'living with…

#auspol #COVID19Aus the model (too flattering) the developed world is stumbling towards is continuous re-vaccination while allowing the virus to circulate. It takes serious time to develop and manufacture variations to vaccines, and then…

#auspol The Premier of NSW today again saying that her government resists lockdowns because it respects people's 'freedoms'. To me freedom includes freedom not to be infected with a lethal virus. But that to one side, why don't we.../1…

#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…

#auspol #COVID19Aus something rarely noted in this pandemic is that workplaces are consistently exempted from Covid safety requirements. Take the NSW Public Health Order released yesterday: /1 Same basic text as the entire pandemic: "When…

#auspol #COVID19nsw public health measures form an integrated system. Conservatives have extracted one tool - contact tracing - and weaponised it, portraying it (like vaccination) as a cure-all. That same silver bullet thinking is the…

#auspol #COVID19Aus join us tomorrow when Peter gives tips on painting and decorating, another area he has no knowledge of or experience in. https://t.co/7x9X2E0dAC

#auspol #COVID19 the longer a pandemic goes on, the less it becomes about science. In fact it's never really about science. A pandemic is a social phenomenon, driven by patterns of interaction between people. 1/ Science can help understand…

#auspol ultimately you need X amount of social restriction to quell an outbreak. You either apply it immediately ('lockdown'), or spread it out over days/weeks/months. What differs is the time scale, though the second approach is more…

#auspol #covid19 it's amazing that the same experiences, repeated multiple times, teach us nothing. Symptomatic of us using our 'normal' life thinking to try to understand a pandemic, the thinking that actually created the pandemic. About…

#auspol #covid19aus NSW planning for the next term, clearly making noises about a mitigation strategy for schools, while the strategy for the wider community is elimination. Not only contradictory, schools will become engine rooms of…

#covid19aus #auspol tens of billions are being spent on transport projects in major cities. Few begin with the basic assumptions. Why do we need so much transport? Why do people require so much mobility to undertake basic everyday life? /1…

#covid19aus #auspol I mean, this is fine. But as always there's that 'living with the virus' subtext, where we whack-a-mole it while trying to live 'normal' lives in the midst of a pandemic. Like a holiday to the Somme in 1916.…

#auspol #covid19aus we have to challenge the ridiculous idea that Australia is now (apparently) lagging the rest of the world. The extreme narrowing of public health strategy towards speed vaccination as the metric of success. /1…

#auspol #covid19nsw the Premier lashing sick people still in circulation today. Looking at mobility data, have to wonder if not closing non-essential work was a smart idea. NSW, the ‘keeping the Economy running’ State. /1…

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

Note how this hawk's head is absolutely still, its attention unwavering even while its body undertakes the most extreme movements. A short thread about how bodies work, potentially life-changing. /1 https://t.co/qofYhonw0g We tend to…

#auspol #covid19 there are many possible meanings of ‘live with the virus’. The political/economic meaning of it is a long way from the expert meaning of it. A desperate need to challenge anybody who utters these words to be specific about…

#covid19 probably spectacularly unpopular to say it, but watching the UK's collective orgasm over a fucking soccer game just seems symptomatic of how divorced from reality rich nations have become. The last days of Rome, bread and circuses.

#auspol #covid19 the perverse calculus of 'freedom' in this pandemic. The loudest voices for removal of public health measures have been libertarian political voices. This is dangerous, disingenuous, deliberate strategy. /1…

#insiders yet again a desperate need for somebody with basic public health knowledge in Insiders discussions. The journalists do zero homework in the area, and just repeat various slogans in circulation.

#covid19 #auspol yet another uncritical puff piece, describing widespread infection of children, and of the vaccinated, both highly risky (and also unethical, with children) strategies. https://t.co/Z2cLceq1DI

@auspol #covid19 to understand why countries are so casually infecting children with Covid, you have to understand that most of them are rich, old, and living off migrant labour. There's no generational thought, just an eternal 'lifestyle'…

#covid19 #auspol it's worth pointing out I think that the standard we're expecting of aged care workers is not consistent with the 'vaccines protect us from harm' foundation of the 4-stage national plan. /1 https://t.co/e4D4yHnUGe On the…

#covid19aus #auspol language does much of the work in politics. Orwell knew it. How did we ever allow the word 'lockdown' to describe the basic act of sheltering from a lethal threat? Spin designed to prevent that sheltering. Not a public…

#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 the tangled web we weave, when we think society is just a whole lot of separate individuals. https://t.co/cSVRsRL5Yd

#nswlockdown #auspol #covid19nsw this is the time to think. Large test numbers show again that the community is self-organising beautifully. The daily stern 'naughty children' narrative from the police, government and CHO underway. There's…

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

#covid19aus #auspol NSW Health Minister, asked to define 'essential work', says that's a matter for an employer and their employees. In other words, if you can't sell the lingerie without staff there, they're essential. Looks…

#auspol #covid19aus it’s not, as commentary claims, that people don’t have common sense that is the problem here. It’s that common sense is meaningless in controlling most spread of the virus. It’s not lack of common sense that makes us…

#covid19 if we don't understand how we reached this point, we'll be back here again. Over and over. I think we reached this point by turning our societies into economies. Where every social transaction is routed through a tiny handful of…

#covid19 trying to think of a better candidate for most idiot line of the pandemic than 'we can't stay locked down forever'. Eliminate spread of the virus, and you can lift lockdowns straight away.

#auspol I put Alan on tonight to see if anything had changed. Nup, was laying into Gladys, and Kerry Chant, for their apparent alarmism. Them being women I think particularly offends him. https://t.co/Y2VbmM19sB

#covid19aus #auspol the Premier attributing increased numbers to increased testing. Every single day more rationalisations of uncontrolled spread. 'Leaking' into neighbouring suburbs = spread, just say it. https://t.co/V0lMrGoHH3

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

#auspol #covid19 the only meaningful pandemic metric. If you think Australia is now running far behind the rest of the world, move there. Barring continent-level genocide in the next 6 months, we’re going to win by several laps.…

#auspol #covid19aus I think the federal LNP are lethally incompetent. But sometimes the daily team sports of Oz politics misses the important details. We’re already vaccinating significantly faster than the UK and US, even without any…

#insiders again, idiot journalists trashing ATAGI, because they don’t have a single millibyte of public health knowledge between them. Australia’s outbreaks are due to poor quarantine. Countries who have used AZ extensively having even…

#auspol #COVID19nsw after stalling the country on airborne spread for 18 months, Peter Collignon now wades into another area in which he has no expertise. Several prominent experts stopped doing science and started doing politics, some…

#covid19 #auspol today's reading, NSW Cabinet, is from the Book of Leviticus. https://t.co/8Zq2SOOklr

#covid19aus #auspol there’s no mystery as to why NSW isn’t progressing out of this outbreak, like Victoria has. It’s been in plain view for over 18 months. The NSW Government thinks the ‘Economy’ is separate to society. The Economy is…

#auspol #covid19 I think we need to see evidence of who these ‘critical workers’ are. Right now they’re being used as the excuse to not go harder with lockdown. Melbourne also has critical workers and was able to lock down harder.…

#auspol Blacktown Mayor on Sky saying we need to get everybody vaccinated. Yes we do, but the framing here is the same as the deadly framing of contact tracing last year. People want a silver bullet, they don’t stop to think that the…

#covid19aus #auspol while you expect more deaths among the vaccinated, when you have widespread vaccination (this is the UK), it's still a sobering reminder that vaccines are not a silver bullet. https://t.co/1rMLTnKvmG

#auspol the comparison with other everyday risks is not the point. Risk exists within a context. The context in NSW is a government refusing to adequately restrict circulation of virus in the community. If it would do that, people wouldn't…

#covid19aus #auspol the cold, dead, genocidal eyes of the loons who think an economy and a society are two separate things. NSW was always going to end up here, because we didn’t pay enough attention to the core beliefs.…

#auspol #covid19aus notice that the same patterns occur both nationally and internationally. The virus outbreaks triggered in wealthier areas, with few restrictions. It spreads to poorer areas, who are then corralled and left to die. /1…

#auspol #covid19 Waleed’s thought is the sort we need more of. Not narrowly confined within a discipline or ideology. This pandemic has seen us lurching from one mythology to the next, all to avoid one basic fact. We’re in a pandemic.…

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

#covid19 it’s all in the phrase. ‘My freedom’. Nobody has individual freedom, didn’t anybody read Robinson Crusoe? On your own life is slavery, just to survive. https://t.co/lTwG0gBGOl

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

#auspol #covid19aus modern conservatives have a rat cunning. Watch them daily steer Australia away from an elimination strategy, using the NSW and Queensland outbreaks as smokescreens, towards the idiot UK strategy. Let virus spread, use…

#auspol #covid19aus I think it's only those with no understanding of basic exponential maths who think regular 100-200 cases per day (each of which may infect 8 others, or more) is something 'under control'. https://t.co/T0ebGkouZP

#auspol #covid19aus A beautiful representation of the spread going on. Fascinating and alarming to compare various versions of it. Proves yet again that you don't get to choose how hard to lockdown, you just get to choose how long you take…

#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 the single most important decision about this pandemic, to accept that Covid will become an endemic disease, attracted not one single criticism or even comment in release of the national strategy. Please read this.…

#covid19aus #auspol At least one expert asking why we make the public health measures the problem, and not the virus. “I think the big focus should be protecting yourselves from harm and spreading it to your loved ones, not just getting…

#auspol #covid19aus the 70-80% target clearly well short of what’s needed. So the resurgence of the mitigation ‘live with the virus’ death cult continues. Meanwhile the public daily encouraged to think and feel those targets mean freedom.…

#auspol #covid19aus The danger here is that people are being encouraged to think that target = ‘freedom’. When that doesn’t happen, public resistance to further effort will build. There’s no substitute for revealing the unvarnished, brutal…

#auspol #covid19aus a disaster, spreading further every day, killing more every day, infecting more every day. Every day what does this change in the NSW approach? Nothing. https://t.co/TPggzLHMTu

#auspol #covid19nsw the daily press conference, where we gather to watch the virus spread all over Sydney and beyond, while the NSW Government does little to stop it, and chastises us for not stopping it for them. https://t.co/sHW0GxeLMQ

#auspol #covid19aus Jack Lang was removed as NSW Premier by the NSW Governor in 1932, using the reserve powers (also used to remove Whitlam), because he wouldn’t follow a national plan agreed to by other Premiers. Can we think of another…

#auspol #covid19aus “The key message though, and the Doherty Model shows it, let’s get vaccinated, and that’s the path to freedom”. Stuart Robert on SKY, running the new strategic narrative for LNP governments. The old ‘live with the…

#auspol #covid19aus #covid19nsw Camus: “…our townsfolk apparently found it hard to grasp what was happening to them. There were feelings all could share, such as fear and separation, but personal interests, too, continued to…/1…

#COVID19nsw #auspol more dire numbers for NSW today, spread into even wider areas of the State. NSW Government response? Nothing. More blather about 'jabs'. May as well be Boris Johnson doing these press conferences. Whitlam and Lang were…

#auspol sometimes I think we made the same mistake with climate change as we have with the pandemic. Emissions, like infections, are the symptom, not the cause. We need to understand what it is in our beliefs and lives that causes both, to…

#covid19aus #covid19nsw #auspol today’s pop quiz. Is this: A. a virus spreading across LGAs unprotected by government, or B. LGA after LGA succumbing to an outbreak of not following rules? https://t.co/TVrDK1Qx1v

#auspol #covid19aus hey Premier, Brad. You’re libertarians, you don’t believe in rules. If you think there’s widespread rule-breaking, you should be applauding. The insane rabbit hole libertarian politics drags us down.…

#covid19nsw #auspol #covid19aus another day, spread into teh regions. Still no change to NSW strategy, in fact more fairy tale projections of freedoms with 70% of adults jabbed. National Cabinet or the Governor must step in.

@RichardfromSyd1 @OrinCordus thought this was an interesting thread. Deepti's response also important I think. https://t.co/SxmI1RwprF

#covid19aus #auspol I had to read this several times, to assure myself that this really is an ex-Deputy CHO, using people on ventilators as the key metric of public health success. https://t.co/S19PTcfkmd

#auspol #covid19aus the federal CHO re-states the NSW idiot libertarian line, that the solution in NSW is people following the rules. So, we just watch the exponential increase and spread daily.

The health advice for the Western and far Western NSW outbreaks? ‘We’re sending more vaccines’. NSW clearly into Tory-UK land now, no attempt will be made to control spread. We’re going to jab our way out. Sorry, we’re going to do…

@covid19nsw #covid19aus #auspol contact tracing is broken: NSW Health is introducing a new measure to ensure people continue to receive prompt notification of their COVID-19 positive test result. Confirmed cases will receive a text message…

#covid19nsw #auspol we 'live with' Covid the way we live with any other infectious disease. We have cases, and we prevent those spreading to other people. Zero Covid does NOT mean 'no cases of Covid'. Deliberate obfuscation. Bullshit is…

Does anybody else ever pause and think, 'I'm arguing with people about the need to stop the community from becoming infected with a pandemic virus?' The gobsmacking genius of the 'Economy' as a mass persuasion tool, that millions now see…

#covid19 #auspol I sometimes think of Dresden, when the public narrative shifts to a bit of stay at home time being too hard, less than 2 years into a pandemic. The bombing was 6 years into horrendous suffering and sacrifice.…

#auspol #covid19nsw #covid19aus police would have orders of magnitude greater impact on containing the pandemic in NSW if they sent only 2-3 officers to Macquarie Street to arrest the NSW Cabinet. Cabinet cares even less about viral spread…

I think it’s worth repeating regularly that we weren’t prepared to ‘live with’: refugees terrorists communism schools not raising flags or singing anthems borrowing to fund public investment. But we are prepared to ‘live with’ a lethal…

#covid19aus #auspol the Doherty Report modelled vaccination of those aged 12+ only as a ‘thought experiment’. Not because the Doherty people are bastards, but because National Cabinet specifically excluded anybody below 16 in Doherty’s…

#auspol #covid19aus the ‘live with the virus’ loons are in the ascendancy again. At every fork in the pandemic road they’ve weaponised public health advice towards letting the virus rip. Idiotic extraction of “70/80%” free of all context…

#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…

#covid19aus #auspol #covid19nsw is there not one fucking journalist there that can say 'that's not what the Doherty Report says'? Has even one of them read it?

#covid19nsw #auspol how you feeling out in the small regional towns, NSW? When asked about maintaining no spread in regional towns, the Premier's answer? "Get vaccinated".

#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 #covid19nsw When asked late yesterday whether opening up with hundreds or thousands of cases still active in the community was a problem, the Director of the Institute said ‘the outcome is the same, but the load on the public…

#auspol #covid19aus adding @PatsKarvelas to the list of journos who didn't do the basic homework, nearly 2 years into the pandemic, and still mistakes elimination for eradication. No country ever 'lives with' a highly infectious lethal…

#auspol #covid19aus I think the whole country knows we'll have to live with Covid. Like they live with impetigo, and head lice. It's never meant epidemic levels of impetigo and head lice in the community. We stamp them out.…

#auspol #covid19aus weasel words. ‘Optimising’ public health measures = reining in uncontrolled spread in NSW. You’d hope. https://t.co/GoNwvPzTGr

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,…

#insiders another fact and knowledge-free Insiders, no public health expertise there to mediate the free flow of meaningless Covid slogans.

#covid19nsw #auspol here's a tip NSW journos. Read this and throw away all the other questions you had planned for 11am today. This is all you need. https://t.co/tn6gOP0szD

#auspol #covid19aus some thought the fires might force a change in climate thinking by the LNP. And then Brittany Higgins and the Respect@Work movement might change their thinking on women. And UK and US deaths might change their 'live…

#covid19aus #auspol NSW moving to 'heroic' front-line workers phase. Standard libertarian playbook. Like the feds do with firies when their inaction on climate change incinerates whole towns. Put the last line of defence into the…

#auspol #covid19aus we need to immediately replace 'live with the virus' messaging with 'live with occasional outbreaks, not widespread disease'. Thanks to #OzSAGE https://t.co/tiWgegtR8k

#covid19aus #auspol 8 facts about 80%. Good reading. https://t.co/wFkqNphGOc

I think I may re-Tweet this every day until the pandemic is over. It really is the only thing we needed to know from the beginning. https://t.co/jdPUbikYIM

#auspol #covid19aus I think we should all adopt ‘Morrijiklian homunculus’ to describe Covid politics right now. And “But if they can just get those ballots in the box, before the little caskets start dropping into the earth…”…

#auspol #covid19aus which chapter of the public health textbook advises opening bars and restaurants in wealthier parts of town, at the same time as peak hospitalisation and death rates are predicted in the poorer suburbs? Asking for a…

Vaccines are fantastic. A vaccination passport is an admission that you haven’t controlled spread of the virus. Like telling people to all carry a gun, rather than reduce crime.

#covid19aus #auspol beginning to wonder if booster doses are just more vax-and-forget type thinking, and the problem isn't really waning efficacy. More an ongoing refusal to control transmission. @AlanBixter? https://t.co/1TuuT0KWXs

“Business needs certainty”. Which disqualifies it as a model to run a society (or pandemic response) with, you’d think. Life doesn’t do certainties, except death. They used to add taxes to that saying, but business found a way to avoid…

@RealOzSAGE these are the types of online presentations Independent SAGE do in the UK that I think you could do in Oz? Would fill the void left by the NSW Government too. I also think Gabriel’s message here is a powerful one.…

#auspol #nswpol the Tale of Two Cities pics are rightly enraging people. But the gradual spread through small country towns all over the State is an even more disgraceful and dangerous story. https://t.co/WdffZUTNyJ

#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 Australia's choice of vaccination strategy has been mostly based on risk of Covid illness i.e. oldest and most vulnerable first. Less said I think is that this is another shift towards a 'live with the virus strategy'.…

@RichardfromSyd1 @OrinCordus @MichaelSFuhrer I think we were discussing a week or so ago what might constitute the threshold between partial TTIQ and broken TTIQ. Latest NSW epi report. Thoughts? Data also 2 weeks' old. Seems to be a…

#auspol #covid19aus this is such a crucial point. It’s clear many think vaccines will turn Covid into an endemic disease, which in turn they think means something relatively mild, ‘just like flu’. More political nonsense.…

#auspol #covid19aus one of the curious things in this pandemic is just how immune to some basic empirical evidence so many seem to be. For example it doesn’t take a lot of time to watch international news and see just how many countries go…

#auspol #covid19aus ⁦@DrZoeHyde⁩ ⁦@drajm⁩ can somebody help me with the highlighted sentence from today’s National Cabinet? I read it as: “The best way to protect children from Covid is…it doesn’t really matter if they get Covid.”…

#covid19 the power of simpleton slogans in this pandemic. Words like ‘balance’, and in this case ‘equilibrium’. Let the virus rip through people, and it will all reach a cosy equilibrium! Probably why malaria and smallpox and TB kill over…

#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…

#nswpol #auspol #covid19aus NSW Premier warning people of dramatic escalation in case numbers even at 80% adults double-vaxxed. The vaccines will protect us from harm. I’m sorry, but an epidemic by my understanding is defined by number of…

@auspol #covid19aus Singapore, with 77% of its total population fully vaccinated, is finding schools are a major source of spread. As the UK found as well. Here in Oz hand-picked experts are assuring parents ‘nothing to see here’.…

#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 #covid19 Modern democracy. The gated community. The more social structures collapse, the more the fortunate fence themselves off. Billionaires buy whole islands and build bunkers to escape climate change catastrophe, at the top end…

#auspol #nswpol When a Premier says cases will go 'through the roof', what they're really saying is 'we will lose control of this disease'. Try to think of any other vaccine-preventable disease that has hundreds of thousands of cases in…

#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…

#auspol @RichardfromSyd1 @OrinCordus 100,000 infected in a week. How does this reconcile with Doherty, who said spread in children is insignificant? Or the MCRI 'schools are safe'? https://t.co/75VjBzuIQP

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 I suggested tongue in cheek that if widespread hospitalisation and death is the metric for Covid and children, why not halt all childhood immunisation? Libertarians make sarcasm and irony redundant. https://t.co/zGE19wGbkA

Speaking to many people, I’m sure they assume life will be relatively normal at the 70/80% vaccination targets. We need to start replacing those numbers with the projected infection numbers. When you mention those, people think you’re…

#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…

#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…

@RichardfromSyd1 @OrinCordus this is the Tweet that I’m trying to weave into my understanding of disease pattern. I thought pattern is defined purely by rate of growth of infection. But this suggests the pathogen itself can be endemic, or…

#auspol #covid19aus I often say that NSW and the feds follow the UK lead in much of their pandemic thinking. Here’s another box we’re about to tick in Oz, mass and deliberate infection of children. Even modelled in the Doherty…

#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…

#nswpol #auspol @samanthamaiden come on journos, this story has been known for months. Why isn't this reported? Enough with the restrictions porn at daily pressers, read Doherty, understand it. https://t.co/9a5CBHkhvt

#auspol #covid19aus I think real caution is needed with self-testing. A good tool where you've lost control of the virus, more problematic where you haven't, as you lose visibility of spread. Much loved by 'live with the virus' folk too,…

If we ask why we’re still in the pandemic, nearly 2 years after it began, my answer would always be: because we don’t understand money. Yesterday the feds started cutting off Covid support, at the end of a year in which it was already…

#auspol #covid19aus Another vital thread on endemicity, a term bandied about with far too much ignorant abandon. Exhibit A, our vacuous hollowman PM. https://t.co/tB38yMLdGE @RichardfromSyd1 @OrinCordus a ripper I think, like Aris’ thread…

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

#auspol #covid19aus speaking with people I know, I don’t think it’s widely understood that this ‘herd immunity’ strategy with children is also the Australian National Plan. https://t.co/EnqfmQob0x

Difficult to know where to start with the magnificence of what Ed Yong has achieved here. I’ve never seen a better popular piece on the inseparability of pandemics and politics, of disease and society. /1 @RealOzSAGE #auspol @CrabbBrendan…

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

@theprojecttv saying ‘Covid Zero’ = zero cases of Covid. Never what it meant. It would take 10 minutes of reading to know this. 2 years into the pandemic and major networks still haven’t made the effort. #auspol #covid19aus

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…

Populist libertarianism thinks expressing your personal feelings = politics. Climate change and Covid say: yeh, nah. https://t.co/CVlmoq1NuK

India, a fraction of the wealth of much of the developed world, is moving towards elimination of Covid. While richer nations open their communities up to widespread infection, to save businesses. The majority of which would have failed…

Speaking to an American friend, I wasn’t aware that community sport is pretty much non-existent in any widespread way, in the US. Most sport there is organised through schools. And there’s something really important here that it made me…

#auspol #covid19aus “…the biggest challenge for Australians will be getting used to hearing about high numbers of confirmed cases. Even in vaccinated societies, the virus continued to circulate, but people did not end up with severe…

#auspol Paul Toole on SKY saying they can’t delay openings further, because people have been given every opportunity to get vaccinated. I hear this nonsense a lot. As with exponential growth, this is political strategy playing on…

#auspol #covid19aus @YouAreLobbyLud @RealOzSAGE the weaponisation of hospitalisation. Economic interests and their representatives in government have weaponised multiple public health concepts in this pandemic, and hospitalisation is…

All political and now pandemic battles play out in this picture. Because binaries make us horny, we tend to pick one side of this picture in our thinking. Neither individual or group are real, they’re both abstractions. Individuals are…

#auspol #covid19aus NSW and Canberra follow the UK in pandemic thinking. NSW for example is now at the ‘take back control from experts’ stage (UK, 2020). If that goes wrong, they’ll spin that as ‘poor advice from experts’, as the UK is…

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…

@EricIdle thoughts? https://t.co/JvEaL7eJHE

#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…

“Letting it spread is a bad, bad idea.” The idea that ‘living with the virus’ (hyper-endemicity) is our way forward is unfathomably stupid. Note the pre-print referenced in the thread showing emergence of a new fitness peak. #covid19aus…

Here’s the Premier, saying NSW is ‘open for business’. Actually most social activity will now re-open, but it’s revealing that his first thought is business. NSW is run by business, for business, you’d have to be blind to not see it.…

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

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…

Just under 50,000 cases registered in the UK today. Should we run a book on how long 'live with the virus' lasts there? Odds of another lockdown before Christmas? #auspol #covid19aus

@RichardfromSyd1 @OrinCordus interesting that there's a more pronounced drop-off in efficacy for the 40-64 group than for the 65+, for AZ in the UK. I'd previously read the opposite. https://t.co/3hghwnK1N9

Debates about the transition to endemicity show how science is not a homogeneous enterprise. This paper from an immunological perspective is quite upbeat. Evolutionary virologists seem less so. Etc. What to do when the science is…

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

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

Less said in relation to this event is how a culture can become so saturated with firearms in its thinking, that armourers become a standard hire for movie production. Would love an assessment of how many billions of bullets have been…

I think we should call it 'Nat-Zero'. #auspol https://t.co/hzXPRyNSrD

The bushfires of summer 2019, and a way to think about climate change. The astronomical volumes of combustion gases produced by those fires, to put those into perspective. On average, every year for the past 263 years, humanity has…

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…

The politics of zero. We’ve had 2 years of outright assault on the idea of zero Covid (both in the eradication and elimination sense.) But take this NSW Government strategy statement, and replace ‘The NSW Road Toll’ with ‘Covid morbidity…

A hard question not being asked in the West. The fracturing of shared beliefs that has crippled both climate change and pandemic action, *is* the ‘plurality of belief’ we at the same time advertise as our democratic strength. Our deepest…

Not boosters, AZ + mRNA as second dose (Pfizer and Moderna). Some interesting reading, courtesy of @NobodyImpawtant . @RichardfromSyd1 @Bertrandization @OrinCordus https://t.co/nNwX7mohXT

The only thing that has become endemic in 2020-21 is stupidity. And I thought JK Jr. had been dead over 20 years. Maybe there's another one. https://t.co/67ZgriRFE3

It would be naive to think something like this won’t happen here. Not only allowing children to become infected, but legislatively mandating it. A defining time for our societies. Choose your side. #auspol #covid19aus…

@9NewsAUS @7NewsAustralia @abcnews how about running this NSW breakdown past the Deputy Premier in NSW, to ask if he still thinks masks for kids in schools are 'ludicrous'? Would it hurt the NSW Cabinet to require masks in schools until…

Anybody else look at this and think 'now there's a country who wants to live with the virus'? Me either. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/FrBBvuTrx3

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

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

The 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…

Been in discussions with business today about the projected tsunami of compensation claims from staff who catch Covid at work. I wonder if those who backed ‘living with the virus’ read the form guide first. Goes way beyond health. #auspol…

"Rapid testing is a ruse designed to trick people into agreeing to uncontrolled spread. Because that is exactly what has happened wherever it is widely available. The UK is a classic example...40K cases a day..." /1 #auspol #covid19aus…

Imagine McKinsey advocating for crime and corruption to become endemic. You expect this Covid nonsense from a business consulting firm. But from so many experts? Any bad thing becoming endemic, is itself a bad thing. Let’s think. #auspol…

I think when even the CMO describes removing public health measures as 'freedom', we may as well give up. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/U3dxRypv3F

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

How to know what to think about waning vaccine efficacy? Revisiting the Oxford study of only a few months ago, showing that AZ may in fact maintain better protection against symptomatic infection than Pfizer, over time. And even providing…

“It must never be taken from us again.” I think he genuinely sees the past 2 years as economic life, stolen by pesky public health measures. The ‘can-do capitalism’ and ‘don’t-do government’ speech. Clearly he leads a don’t-do government,…

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

Do you think the spin merchants who came up with 'pandemic of the unvaccinated', as a libertarian dodge to get rid of PH measures, now think about kids being the only unvaccinated left? The group they're 'cautious' to vaccinate? #auspol…

The mythology of the ‘moderate centre’ in politics is widespread. The centre is an entirely relative position, easily shifted over time. The ecological fallacy, in politics. Attributing averages to individuals. #auspol…

I think plagiarised, but at least somebody there may not have been a cold-eyed zealot. #auspol https://t.co/IhDZCcKEZo

Drosten here says vaccination can prevent the development of endemic Covid. But can Covid ever be endemic? I see so much confusion over this, so a few questions for those who might know. /1 #covid19aus @RealOzSAGE @c_drosten…

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

New @RealOzSAGE modelling for NSW through to June 2022, taking into account degree of contact tracing and under-12 vaccination. Still to my knowledge the only peer-reviewed pandemic model we’ve seen used. #auspol #covid19aus…

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…

Libertarians don’t solve problems. They re-brand them as non-problems, or as faux problems they can manipulate in strategic ways. They can’t solve collective problems, because they don’t believe the collective is even a thing. Quick…

‘Finally will have a Saturday off’. The genius of libertarian strategy, to get even the young to think slavery to a job is freedom, and sheltering from a lethal virus is oppression. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/TlVG51Xp9e

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…

“The World Health Organization, noting that the variant has already been detected in many countries and that closing borders often has a limited effect, called for frontiers to remain open.” The countries who have done easily the best…

The daily spin. Take the phrase 'mild Covid'. The focus is all on the 'mild'. Compare it with the phrase 'mild stroke'. Does anybody want to have a stroke, no matter how mild? Language is politics. #auspol #covid19aus

Reckon experts read that headline and get the pecking order here? It won't matter what they find. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/eT5Wwg0zBP

“National Cabinet further noted that the Therapeutic Goods Administration and the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation are in late stage consideration regarding when Pfizer can be rolled out to 5 to 11 year olds.” Focus on…

Running out of people to vaccinate? I can think of a few million sitting in infants and primary schools right now willing and able to get the curve going up again. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/NPvAs0AZSe

I like news from the front-line of Covid, if I can put it that way. How our National Plan is playing out in everyday life. A short thread about a meeting. /1 #auspol #covid19aus I was in a meeting with the senior managers of a large…

Imagine a kitchen company saying its approach to silicosis in its workers was to tell them to ‘live with’ it. That political slogan for Covid violates basic workplace law. Business is required by law to eliminate Covid spread. #auspol…

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…

Waleed halfway to the Holy Grail here. We're not acting 'globally' to end the pandemic. But we're not doing that because the 'global' as we think of it, doesn't exist. You can't create international from national. /1 #auspol #covid19aus…

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

Endless confusion. I thought ‘big waves of infection’ *is* a pandemic. Endemic disease doesn’t infect in waves? Why is there such widespread variation in claims about endemicity? (Maybe the confusion is all mine.) #COVID19 @RealOzSAGE…

All politics is identity politics. Dominant groups lose the visibility of their identity, they think their privilege is just ‘how things are’. They don’t have to fight for identity, so it disappears from their view. A few short thoughts on…

I don’t think the US really has a love of guns. It has an anxiety about communal or public life. In extreme libertarian countries, every person is their own nation State, with their own army. https://t.co/ZAnfBTZclC

It’s too early to say how bad Omicron is. But absolutely the prime time to stop it spreading while we find out.

Will this be the tipping point that will force us to at last to deal with prevalence, with spread? To finally stop substituting society with an ‘economy’? I’m not confident. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/UZAfj5QH23

@RichardfromSyd1 this made me think of you. https://t.co/JrgxNw83RY

I think in the UK red must mean ‘good’. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/wdPRSxeIr4 https://t.co/kmPXMX81gJ

Up is down, left is right, day is night. We’re living in a Dr Seuss book. https://t.co/eTAMubtZsg

Am I reading this correctly, these are results for people who have had a 3rd dose? @RichardfromSyd1 @OrinCordus @Bertrandization @djf0001 https://t.co/ZrIx6aMhFs

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…

Perhaps the hidden story of 'hospitalisations are all that matter'. As many have suspected in Australia too. Here's the UK experience. Bed occupancy rates look of concern, but maybe manageable post-vaccination. /1 #COVID19…

I think in Oz libertarian politicians sometimes don't realise they're talking to a pretty small minority. It only works if you make it about aspiration, status. Like schools, and tax. Public safety? Not so sure. Very small and whiney…

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

Populism means what it says - doing popular things. We think that’s what democracy is. It absolutely isn’t. Libertarian populists surrender leadership to popularity. Leaders once *led* us through adversity. Now they pander to popular whim.…

Only hospitalisations matter was reaffirmed at National Cabinet today. Made me think about a heart disease health strategy that said 'people can have as much heart disease as they like, we'll just make sure it's managed within our ICU…

The UK moving swiftly now to pure Trumpland. Relentless attacks on expertise, leaving the field wide open for populist, ignorant windbags to control all facets of life. Democracy eats itself when it thinks popularity is its metric.…

Massive real-world libertarian trial. Several weeks where most of NSW stopped wearing masks, because ‘nobody told them to wear one’. Now they’ve been told to wear one, they all put one on. A population chafing at being told what to do?…

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…

To use this graphic again. Imagine if thousands of people in NSW were getting whooping cough, or TB, every day. And that most of them weren’t going to hospital. Would we say ‘all good, let it spread’? I think we know the answer.…

Saw this. Thoughts? ⁦@RichardfromSyd1⁩ ⁦@Bertrandization⁩ ⁦@djf0001⁩ ⁦@longfacehorse⁩ ⁦@polioandme⁩ ⁦@OrinCordus⁩ https://t.co/DXscfBj2lU

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

What number of days until we find out if Christmas Day was a superspreading event? https://t.co/Fy1fhxbiIK

Anti-vaxers a scapegoat for governments who refuse to control transmission. When you control spread, very few get infected, vaccinated or not. Only when we outsource all public health work to the ‘jab’ do anti-vax loons become a critical…

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 -…

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

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…

I would say the majority of experts I read casually make claims about Covid becoming endemic. As if Covid being present in the population = endemic. It being ‘present’ in repeated epidemic waves seems a strange sort of endemicity.…

“In 2022, the COVID-19 pandemic will end. Driven by the inexorable, inevitable spread of the Omicron variant and the use of vaccines, the global population will generate immunity to this virus.” (Dr Coatsworth) We need a dark green texta…

No matter what you think of Stan, this is the thing we need to talk most about, and good on him for continuing to raise it. The problems with democracy. I don’t agree with everything here, for example I think social media is a response to…

I think consumers are super ‘confident’. That they’ll get Covid. https://t.co/BJHNpGvaDi

From a nurse in NSW Health. “We are short staffed every shift by about 4 nurses. Cannot recruit any more staff, no one is applying. Staff are resigning because of the new protocols and workload. We have had pandemic pay relinquished, so if…

I’m not confident there’s widespread understanding of the difference between medicine and public health. https://t.co/8KOe1pCoBk

The next UK-imported spin, people in hospital ‘with Covid’ rather than ‘from Covid’. Only 25% of those hospitalised in the UK right now for Omicron are unvaccinated. The vast majority of hospitalised are there because of Covid. /1…

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

Same pattern, again and again. Infections begin amongst the young and mobile, then spread into the old. Severity thus appears ‘milder’ to begin, then gradually worsens. #covid19aus https://t.co/NoASgKVTgl

Worth looking at the numbers in this thread to see the growing disaster in regional and remote NSW. Not mentioned in public discussion. https://t.co/UN9QXfszDl

The idea of ‘living with’ natural disasters. So much politics is done with language. Take floods. Yes we do ‘live with’ them, in the sense that we accept that they will sometimes happen. We DON’T live with them WHILE THEY ARE HAPPENING. We…

Such a rich vein of horseshit here to be mined. Most obviously ‘balance’ and ‘proportionate’ as weasel words again, where nothing is being balanced, and the only proportional weighing is just how sick workers can get before they collapse…

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…

The politics of maths. Covid deaths in the UK, but the same principles apply globally. Currently running between 300-500 deaths per day. That’s 110,000-150,000 per year. (1500 die in an average flu year, in the UK). Short thread about…

It’s difficult to see anything except social implosion within a month, in most of Australia. The alternatives seem: - Omicron magically going away, or - renormalising widespread disease and death as normal life. The US and UK are well down…

Science is framed by values. For example, here. Whether we prioritise widespread infection of people to try to end a pandemic. Or whether we prioritise fixing some basics, like clean air in buildings and hyper-obsessive travel.…

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

The real power of Facebook and Instagram is as contact tracing tools. To track all of the 'please infect me' moments from peoples' social lives.

The slogans do their work. Deep neural programming. Vast numbers can repeat this in their sleep, without any idea what any of the words mean. https://t.co/IeMN5NwOhd

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…

About 20 million dead. So far. When we lost fewer than that in WW1, we had an enemy. This 20 million is mostly dead because our true enemies are the people who think the enemy isn’t an enemy. They want to live with it.…

I thought hospitalisation numbers here are cumulative? Not sure how they go backwards by 82 in a day? Not really like testing data, which can change as results come in. Or am I missing something obvious? @juliette_io @RichardfromSyd1…

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…

“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will…

There’s something so glorious about actual journalism. We don’t see much of it any more, it’s too often PR for the vested interests who bought up all the mastheads. https://t.co/4PphPL2EZC h/t to @cfranks_chris Red this one…

We live in epidemic social systems. We’ve replaced a public sphere of institutions focused on multi-generational, often invisible action on collective problems, with a daily, even hourly, ‘viral’ spread of faddish ideas and enthusiasms. /1…

In populist democracy, numbers = power. In Western democracies, numbers = boomers. The boomers are about to face the real risk of widespread infection in their demographic for the first time in the pandemic. Let’s see what happens with…

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…

I wonder if it's enough thought about or said, that the current global Covid strategy hinges entirely on the 3rd vaccine dose not failing. If it does, the whole 'live with the virus' edifice comes tumbling down, unless we get new vaccines.…

'Not only is the spread of this virus inevitable, it's necessary'. We need a roundtable expert discussion to debate endemicity and the supposed pathways towards it, I think. https://t.co/qXYcmOAUzo

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…

I like to track how the spin beds down in ordinary conversation and life. Another example today. In a meeting a senior manager said "I think by mid-year we shouldn't even be testing any more. You'll just not to come to work when you're…

Re-sharing Bruno. He’s talking about all human institutions. If you’re looking on every day and thinking the world has gone mad and can’t be saved, you may actually be right. Institutions ‘don’t get back up’. We’re living in the ruins.…

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 -…

So I’m reading this correctly - this is Omicron reinfection i.e. people catching Covid multiple times in a short period? https://t.co/80RJzeBrNg

SARS-Cov-2 is airborne. But I think it's more important to say, it's mostly STALE air-borne. Yes you can catch it outside, but it's much less likely. Like most respiratory viruses, it's primarily a disease of the built environment.

The real story of the pandemic is not in these graphs we’re now used to. A ‘case’ is an infected person completely severed from their geographic, social and political context. Those contexts are what generate and drive the disease.…

Watching my kids swab their noses twice a week, them hating it and the anticipation of what the result might be, I’m reminded of the fuckwits who thought this was better for them than the relaxed studying from home they did in the past 2…

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

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

A good one for every single journalist in Australia to read. I've not heard one of them press a politician or expert in 2 years to say specifically what they mean by 'live with the virus' or 'endemic'. Press and press, make them spell it…

From a public policy point of view, the only moonshot I see working longer-term against pandemics is ventilation. It's engineering. Behavioural and attitudinal change is a lost cause in populist neoliberal societies. Thoughts @GeoffHanmer ?

With government messaging relentlessly focused on ‘live with the virus’, what did Professor Dore and others think would happen to vaccine urgency? #auspol #COVID19Aus https://t.co/geVbrPacDz

Every effort is being made by conservative governments globally to suppress attention to deaths. In the UK they're planning to not even report them. Even constant reference to 'cases' and 'hospitalisations', and the seemingly.../1 #auspol…

@RichardfromSyd1 @Bertrandization thoughts? Richard it relates also to our discussion yesterday with Simon Rowe (was that his name?) https://t.co/mONB2qTQaK @djf0001 @rossleedham @longfacehorse

The only thing children seem resilient to in this pandemic is infection. Everything else, including public health measures to prevent infection, risks damaging them for life. Strip away this constant BS. The sub-text is always the Economy.…

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

Superb thread showing again the power of maths to do politics. How our focus on rates instead of absolute numbers is enabling the removal of all public health measures, except vaccines. Many people are dying, fully vaccinated. #auspol…

In our success against HIV, did we make condoms: A) free, or B) tax deductible? (Hint: we had a government then who didn't think their job was to 'get out of the way' of a virus.) https://t.co/8nMf8oGyQS

Half the town I live in is isolating not because of asymptomatic testing, but because at least one member of the family is sick with Covid. We can do this the smart way, with testing, or just wait for widespread illness to do the isolation…

Of course the hope is that by mid-to-late 2022 Covid will have settled into a low-prevalence, low-morbidity endemic state. I keep coming back to the fact that the only vaccines we currently have, are waning for Omicron as well. Even the…

Democracy has been an embarrassment in this pandemic. Whereas China has smashed it. We need to rethink our ideas around what ‘authoritarian’ means. It says a lot more about us, than it does about China. Telling people what to do is not…

A pandemic is over when we stop widespread infection. It’s in the definition. That’s the Tweet.

If we stopped celebrating the removal of public health measures, and started celebrating elimination of widespread infection, the pandemic would be over. Those celebrations are what generate the next wave. The same pattern, in every wave.…

‘A new way of thinking’ in Denmark. Not really, it’s the same way of thinking they had late last year, when they declared the pandemic over. What’s new I guess is the ignoring of death. That’s all the rage. https://t.co/BjGkvhZypp

The out-of-body experience of the pandemic today. A thread on the decoupling of thought from reality, with Covid strategy. And why we only ever needed about 3 days to be totally rid of Covid, but we’re into our 3rd year of it. /1…

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…

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…

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

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…

I think 3. is the issue in many countries. Australia's public health journalism is letting us down. Obvious questions not being asked, for 2 years. Like wtf 'live with the virus' even means. https://t.co/8DZoOTqzQ5

I’d like a new ‘proportionate’ response to the pandemic. Those who argue for widespread infection of the population - 50% is a number bandied about - must demonstrate their commitment to this suggestion by exhibiting the proportionately…

Wonderful thread on the sort of risk assessment we can all do when deciding how to act as the pandemic continues. Vastly more nuanced than anything most governments are doing (which is mostly, nothing). https://t.co/5BuqJAN0LZ

Was listening to the CEO of Flight Centre on RN this morning, talking about borders re-opening. A few thoughts. /1 #auspol A common line was repeated, that 'business needs certainty'. Actually business doesn't need any more or less…

Hey, any journos out there who want an easy story. How about somebody call out the claim from the NSW Government on low Covid spread in schools? Based on NCIRS data collected before Omicron and Christmas? Kinda seems important. #auspol…

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.…

Today will be the day when journalists ask two basic questions: 1) what do we do when the 3rd dose of vaccine wanes in 3-4 months’ time? 2) why are we using 2021 data to assess Covid spread in schools? I know, I know. A man can dream.…

James Valentine did a great interview this morning with an industrial relations researcher (forgotten the name, sorry). Before 7.30 if you want to re-listen. The points that I think are so vital right now: /1 #auspol 1) For NSW nurses to…

Spread in schools is 'extremely low', said the NSW Government this week, referring to 2021 data (but pretending it was 2022 data). In 2022 Covid is feasting in schools. Apparently it's better for the kiddies. https://t.co/RyBoJRLh13

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…

Early polling suggests people don’t want to live with the virus in South Australia either. Covid may clean out the entire National Cabinet, given time. Also look at how much young men are attracted to the LNP. There’s something in that I…

Between the 400+ leaving every week, and the others being poached to staff super yachts, let’s hope the wardsmen can read a chart. https://t.co/z3XG1ptuDo

It's all very Old Testament now, Australia 2022. We've had plagues (mice), pestilence (Covid), now floods. I'm feeling that direct link back to the text in many of the government's policies. https://t.co/CgXmyLLfix

I doubt he’ll face the same challenge as some workers I know, who have run out of sick leave already. Another ‘live with the virus’ fantasy. People being repeatedly infected don’t have infinite sick leave. And it’s not their fault they…

Prevalence is still the main game, I think. Not least because a pandemic is defined by case numbers, not severity of outcome. Will the NSW/Australia case numbers plateau at a high rate, like right now? Or go down? Is Covid a permanent…

It's heretical to say it, as a huge supporter of vaccination. But I think if we hadn't developed Covid vaccines, the public health response may have been more effective, saved more lives and shortened the pandemic. Politicians use them…

If you’re a public health professional, and your Covid shtick is to repeat ’get vaccinated’ like a parrot while ridiculing all other simultaneous attempts to control the spread of infection, why is somebody paying you? Parrots cost a lot…

Another expert on the radio this afternoon, talking about the death of a 2-year old from Covid. Parents can be reassured, apparently, that the ‘majority’ of children will have a mild illness. /1 Worth repeating I think that there isn’t a…

The hypothesis that most of Australia thinks 'living with the virus' is a crock of shit is so far supported by polling. https://t.co/764UuXMZO6

The minimisers love to say 'child infection just reflects wider community infection'. That'd be a perverse reading of graphs like this. Even if it were true, they're saying 'Covid is out of control everywhere'. And that's supposed to be a…

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…

Cut through the BS at least once a day. We’re led by a small group of corporately-funded pirates, who captured governments and gaslit entire populations into believing that we need to let a lethal virus spread among us, so that we can get…

There’s an existential tension in play right now, for our societies. Their ‘normal’ functioning is not compatible with containment of infectious disease, without a dramatic pharmaceutical. Hypermobility and mass gatherings. I think we need…

Speaking with people at work (the few that are left), about how some in the UK have now had Covid 3-4 times. 'Huh, how is that possible?' They thought getting it would give them 18 months of protection. The public health disaster is best…

Covid minimisers hate the comparison between live with the virus, and feedlot farming. A good reason to draw the comparison regularly. /1 https://t.co/K4rhAcfD3H It takes a modern form of political sociopath to see families using up their…

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…

"…they (ATAGI) are potentially going to recommend a second booster, which would then be potentially the start of an annual program for people 65 and above," Mr Hunt said. Do we read this as ‘and the rest of you have repeated infection for…

"Attempts to reach 'herd immunity' through exposing people to a virus are scientifically problematic and unethical. Letting Covid-19 spread through populations, of any age or health status will lead to unnecessary infections, suffering 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…

With no government appetite to control virus spread or even offer ongoing mass vaccination except to vulnerable groups, is a person better off catching Covid now, while they’re still closer to their last shot? Won’t risk of severe disease…

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

Two races in, and the rule changes lead to…exactly the same teams winning all of the races, and everybody else being an afterthought. The whole formula is a joke. https://t.co/Gi7eLfKVTk

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

AHPPC appears to have recommended last Wednesday that 7-day isolation for the infected and close contacts is to remain? Is this now the decision, or does the fact nobody seems to have said anything about it mean National Cabinet is…

The Will Smith thing shows so well I think how neoliberal, libertarian N=1 politics has atomised society. What should be a case of common assault becomes instead a platform for a bewildering array of personal grievances. Everything is…

This seems a not uncommon view among virologists. I wonder about surrendering the control of spread, it’s spread that is the social and political core of infection. It’s the ‘public’ health bit. It indicates poor living conditions, that…

Let them eat cake, in the old language. https://t.co/VfVEDeLeDt

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…

Some now pushing the narrative that people should feel sorry for the PM, because people are being so mean to him. I think they (and the PM) should be advised that this is just a basic case of 'sour grapes'.

I think it’s worth focusing on the scale of National Cabinet incompetence in 2021-22. Also, electorally I think that Victoria-driven outbreak in 2020 was maybe much more fundamental politically than we realise. Let me show you another…

One of the disturbing experiences of the pandemic is the revealing of thoughts and beliefs of close friends and family. Beliefs they had often kept to themselves until now. And the nastiness of some of those beliefs, that are now seen in…

It may have been these stats that prompted some to demand kids be unmasked. Maybe they think the paediatric staff in hospitals need more to do. https://t.co/iBrBiHWSue

We foolishly thought the herd immunity folk were being metaphorical. Little realising that as modern economic work units, medicating to keep productive output going is us as well. https://t.co/tdANhM51E8

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

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

Age and 'underlying conditions' would be used to rationalise the fact that most deaths ARE vaccinated. The public health point here is, these are preventable deaths, if we could get off our complacent arses and control spread.…

I defy anybody to read this table from the NSW Government, and make sense of allowing the entire State to become infected. A potential public health catastrophe in the making, where's the risk management? https://t.co/sZpB0ZeGV5 h/t…

The biggest mortality group right now in NSW is the triple-vaxed. Not because the vax doesn't work, settle petals. But because by not restricting spread, the virus is reaching all of the most vulnerable people anyway, who are now left with…

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

"Britain has led from the front in removing social distancing restrictions, having rightly taken the view that once everyone who can and wants to be vaccinated has had that chance, then the Government has essentially fulfilled its public…

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

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

My audition as a political journo. "Prime Minister, you now know the price of a loaf of bread and litre of milk. Can you tell us how many people have died of Covid since you let it rip?"

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

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…

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

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…

At a social event tonight, reflecting on the power of political slogans. Multiple people talking about Covid, saying ‘we’re all going to get this now, it’s like the flu, we’re going to have to live with it’. No independent thought, just…

“We need to start living with this virus, a similar way we live with the flu.” Tony Blakely. ‘Living with’ other infectious diseases was always about avoiding catching them. Like living with your dog’s farts, it’s not about shoving your…

The real reason ‘living with the virus’ had to become the strategy. Poor people were forgetting their place. ‘Endemic’ was originally a term applied to infectious diseases when they were left to fester in poorer countries. Now endemic =…

@kumitaguchi thank you for the Insight program on transgender sportspeople. I thought it was a superbly nuanced and sensitive treatment of what is a highly emotional topic.

Lovely thread on the central thing we should talk about, but don't. Reducing transmission, reducing infections. Reducing sickness. Sane societies don't titrate sickness against hospital capacity. https://t.co/NhXtBmVDlk

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…

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

If you look at job ads, increasingly they publish no salary. And within organisations it’s often difficult to know what co-workers are paid. This is deliberate, to suppress wages. Short 🧵on how similar principles are being used with Covid.…

I speak to people who say things like ‘we need to DO something about what’s going on with our society, with Covid. Twitter is just talking.’ As a society we do little BUT doing. “Just do it”. Without thought or discussion. What we need is…

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

@abc730 it wasn’t ‘lockdowns’ that pushed out elective surgery times. It was allowing spread of Covid.

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

Governments thought Covid was a 'supply' problem too, late last year. Greater supply of Covid to the community would end the pandemic, apparently. And it did, for about 6000 people, who no longer have to worry about it.

I think we've arrived at Stage 4. https://t.co/G9ljKl9oRi https://t.co/eQJrQJwdLL

PM, talking about Covid. “We want to put that in the rear-vision mirror. We’re putting this pandemic behind us and all the intervention of government in our lives.” Am thinking maybe it was the lack of 'intervention' that killed nearly…

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

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…

It takes an outsider to see us for who we really are. Unlike the US libertarians, who are trying to undermine Oz from afar, Damien came to live here and discovered something profound about us we’re forgetting ourselves. A required vaccine…

@samanthamaiden and @David_Speers suggesting (I think correctly) that a large part of the big pre-poll and postal voting numbers is people trying to avoid Covid. The thing politicians and most journalists dare not name. #auspol

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…

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

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

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

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

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

Another thing that I don't think is widely understood (first of a few Tweets about Qld), is that in Queensland the LNP isn't a coalition. It's a single party. The Liberal National Party of Queensland. #auspol

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

The US has a ridiculous number of firearms. And it also has a culture of violence, the two are indissociable. Why is the US so violent? That’s a key question, I think. And I’ll bet its hyper-libertarian viewpoint is the culprit. Each to…

Let’s make media ratings a type of primary vote. SKY News gets about 40,000 viewers on a good night. Its primary vote is therefore about 0.2%. Compared to the ALP primary vote of over 30%. SKY’s trick is to make so much noise that people…

A shrewd US analyst yesterday said the gun issue in the US is a battle between urban and rural America. Which you can see here. I Tweeted this week that the Australian politics of pragmatism is largely due to us being so heavily urbanised.…

Employers are often not revealing Covid cases in workplaces, quoting ‘privacy’ as their reason. If you read the guidelines, you’re supposed to tell your friends if you’re positive, but telling workmates is entirely at the discretion of the…

‘Gaslighting’, political attempts to make you doubt your (very sane) incredulity at being asked to return to ‘normal’ life with the pandemic still raging. But it’s closer to a type of grooming I think. Gradually breaking down your…

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…

The teal wave was a victory for the heart of Australian politics. Community. Community is independent of scale, it’s not local or global. It bypasses territorial war. I think it’s what makes Oz politics and life unique. We need to unpack…

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…

A trick the N=1 crowd use to win at everything, is to make people think you have to choose between individuals and groups. But what’s good for everybody is also what’s best for you. Groups are just individuals, individuals live in groups.…

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…

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

Existing economic interests won over many working people by reframing their lack of money and freedom as theft by government. But when you read the policies of business lobby groups, on deregulation, you can see who actually took that…

Microbes live in ecosystems, which we’re a part of. Public health measures are designed changes to the ecosystem. Pandemics are the breakdown of ecosystems. It’s all ecology. ‘Live with the virus’ people utter ecological words, without…

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…

Covid minimisers who flat out deny being Covid minimisers, are always followed by roving packs of Covid minimisers. They know. Useful for blocking, they flush each other out. One juicy thread can help you identify and remove sometimes…

I think we need Robo-ICAC. Software that scans political grants and donations and automatically sends infringement notices to politicians.

There’s been a clear attempt by ultra-conservative politicians in Australia to replace our communitarian politics with US and UK-style ‘personal responsibility’. (Of which these same pollies demonstrate none.) It’s untenable to allow…

‘Mandatory, compulsory.’ Politics is cultural. In Australia these words have never meant ‘government giving orders’. They’ve meant the community, through its elected government, looking after the community, through collective action. We…

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water. https://t.co/LsUTceFSuX

I talk about community a bit, a 🧵about community and Twitter. It seems social media builds out a platform that reflects certain ideas and assumptions about society, that we don't always question. /1 Twitter and other social media mostly…

It feels like Dan thinks copying Dom will save him politically from the freedom crowd in Victoria. But Dom is deeply unpopular, and the freedom crowd is a minority in Victoria. Seems like dumb politics to me. https://t.co/Jg5YG7Pp1w

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…

I think the minority of trolling Covid-minimising scum here on Twitter should have to meet with the families of the daily slaughter. https://t.co/qHCsGacEiz

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

'We gave you all vaccines, what else do you want?', said no public health textbook, ever.

There's not a single number here that has moved meaningfully in months. The State has given up, in every way. And I think it gets worse, in terms of our ongoing public health. #auspol /1 https://t.co/nOFQTUqI4Y Fewer than half of the…

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

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…

I thought of George Monbiot’s critical piece when discussions about energy needed to run electric cars came up on Q&A this week. We don’t question mobility itself. That mobility is dislocation, fundamentally anti-social. Cars are…

@powell_robs @ErinVincent1 have you seen the format of ‘The Pledge’ from SKY UK? The disparate viewpoints engage in conversation with each other, rather than just express individual views through a host. Add key experts and I think it’d be…

Modern economics provides a veneer of pseudoscientific language to disguise ongoing colonial feudalism. For example, cheap labour from overseas used to be called slavery. Now called ‘labour hire’, transacted through companies who would…

I’m not sure one leader or expert for hire framed PH measures as freedoms here in Oz. Despite us living the truth of it for nearly 2 years. The ex-PM had a rat cunning, describing them as ‘lockdowns’ from the beginning and their absence as…

I’m loving the actuaries riding into battle against the Covid minimisers. Very short thread on deaths, based on recent analysis of US death data from https://t.co/4zjjZrbXKB /1 Covid minimisers switch between absolute and relative figures…

I like to track the politics of language. Right now the climate change denial monkeys are keen on 'we're not there yet', when referring to battery storage. By which they mean we can't store gigawatts of power to replace a power station.…

Many say the Chinese think and plan long-term, across generations. But conservatives do as well, they worked with conservative church leaders in the 1950s in the US to map a long strategy to cripple the secular State, each for their own…

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 wonder if the greatest gift for anti-vaxxers is the (failing) use of vaccines in this pandemic without supporting public health measures. We don't allow diseases for which we have vaccines to spread, just because we're vaccinated?…

Conservative politicians were already saying in early 2020 that their Covid strategy was to maintain public health measures ‘until vaccines are available’. Vaccines ARE public health measures, they only work in a wider context of control.…

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

What makes it possible for governments to ignore public health processes in a pandemic is the suppression of information about what’s really going on. A short thread about strategy, about taking our society back. /1 #auspol #covid19aus All…

Societies run by imitation. Power is really imitation, we copy those we admire. Our best weapon against Covid is ‘influencers’ acting against Covid. Often that’s musicians. What are they doing? Stroking their neglected egos at huge…

Was reading the NSW Health mission on their Twitter page while accessing today's numbers. "Healthy people, now and in the future." Hats off to them for continuing to try, with government refusing to back public health. 23 more today who…

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

Mark Butler on RN Breakfast, indistinguishable from Greg Hunt and the previous government, on Covid. 'Vaccines and treatments' appears to be the talking point spin. Protecting hospitals is the thing apparently, not people, like Sir…

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…

Spent several hours in a small closed room with pretty much zero ventilation on Monday, with somebody who tested positive for Covid the next morning. I wore an N95. Escaped infection. I’m thinking the mask worked.

To help those who think a ‘wave’ is something that ‘looks like a wave on a graph’. https://t.co/uvDOlYLiFZ

Great, important thread. https://t.co/yDkI3bzCKO

Worth repeating that the true function of National Cabinet was to weaken the close link between Premiers and their public health situation and teams in each State, and force them to fight against the bland groupthink consensus of the…

Sharon Lewin this morning, quite correctly restating that the national Covid strategy is reduction in severe disease and death. That's what's tying our hands. We need it to be a public HEALTH strategy, against DISEASE. Against infection.…

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…

“We need to act now to slow the spread of the virus in the community.” (Kerry Chant, today.) Government not interested. It's fine for people to do fevered vomiting, with headaches & exhaustion, 3-4 times a year. While Covid potentially…

Brad Hazzard’s plea for wider eligibility for a 4th dose of vaccine would be more admirable, if the NSW Government’s only motivation for doing it wasn’t their determination to do nothing else. Let’s ‘follow the health advice’ again, and…

I think Peter did Australia a service with this Tweet. An articulate guy across much of what’s going on in society. But had absolutely no idea of the scale of the Covid disaster. Demonstrates so clearly the magnitude of the political…

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

Governments invented public health. They said to their experts 'find us a way to prevent widespread disease and death, so we can keep society going.' It's why we have local councils, for example, that was one recommendation. No 'balancing'…

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

More magical thinking. I’ll be glad of a 4th shot for my own protection, but shots aren’t the way out of this pandemic. Here’s an idea. Albo wants to emulate Hawke, with a business-unions accord on IR. How about using that same model to…

Longish quote about Marek's Diseases in chickens in next few Tweets, and then I wanted to ask those who understand vaccines if the Covid vaccines are 'leaky' in this same way, with the same possible consequences? (Thanks to @iko_iko11 and…

When you stop an ‘Economy’, nearly everybody gets healthier and wealthier. We’re still not seeing that I don’t think, allowing the profiteers of the old normal to frame the true narratives of fear. The fear of changing the old normal.…

Newton’s 3rd law of pandemic action - for every proposed action, there is an equal and opposite obstructing reaction from a small group of Covid experts. The same pattern happening in every country. Whether it’s airborne spread, masks, or…

I’ve Tweeted about how the apparent disregard for the health of populations shown now by governments is entirely consistent with working people being treated as we treat livestock. This isn’t an animal rights thing (though it is that too),…

Managed to book in a fourth dose for Monday. Vaccination is something that could easily be done outside, under a shade etc. Annoys me you have to go and sit inside a surgery or clinic that has had potentially infected people inside it all…

There’s no such thing as choice in terms of whether to eliminate wide community spread of Covid. It’s only about time, the longer we delay it, the harder and more expensive it gets. You can’t function as a society with wide community…

‘Working from home’ is another framing that needs rethinking. It’s like ‘work-life balance’. We keep framing work as an opposite to life and home. Many workers like working from home because they want their work to happen in their…

Who has personal responsibility for NSW? That's a job I think, a well-paid one. https://t.co/HWUiejNsIq

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

We 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…

These protesters demand freedom from public health action, which they see as a type of tyranny. But humans are social animals, nobody really wants freedom. All humans form hierarchies, even scientists, shaped by what the group in question…

@Mark_Butler_MP on RN again this morning, and he and @PatsKarvelas, @David_Speers and @samanthamaiden all missed the obvious solution to Covid. The problem is the solution, as Bill Mollison used to say. /1 #auspol #COVID19Aus Australia…

If the ALP thought like the LNP, they'd realise that the enormous pressure building on them on Covid is the PERFECT opportunity to ditch ridiculous tax cuts they don't believe in anyway. #auspol

If a business can’t afford WHS of a standard that prevents Covid spread, should we: A. close the business and charge it under WHS law, or B. allow workers to get infected, and to infect their families, some of whom will die? Right now…

I don’t think we fully grasp the impact of neoliberal and libertarian beliefs. For example the so common idea that the public will somehow drive change, for anything. That’s pure neoliberal/libertarian belief. It’s a fantasy.

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

One of my projects is to unwrap neoliberal, libertarian framings of our collective lives. I don’t think it’s widely understood just how deep these are, how entrenched in how we see the world. One that I think may challenge many is secrecy…

Tony Blakely on The Project saying now isn’t the time for mask mandates. We need to wait a few weeks to see if the health system is falling over first. Those were almost the verbatim words.

Paul Kelly on RN avoiding questions about mandates. The Herd Immunity Taskforce applies those. Phil Coorey then with some claptrap about getting the chills at the thought of more mandates. Over 5000 in hospital, more than 50 dead every…

The expression ‘going viral’ was always assumed to be an analogy. But viruses never go viral. Going viral is always a social process. We don’t live ‘alongside’ viruses, as politicians say. We’re their hosts, they live inside us. They…

I think this maybe shows the tension between medical and public health thinking. Medical ‘management’ is focused on risk to the individual. But the greatest risk from Covid infection can be risk of infecting others, and accurate testing is…

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…

Climate deniers talk about 'baseload' power. Which they think means minimum supply, when in fact it means minimum demand before you have to start switching off power stations. Look at this, solar panels in Australia may remove baseload…

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…

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.…

In rich nations, it seems we assumed a pandemic would be like a football game that gets washed out, a temporary inconvenience. Rather than a Battle of the Somme type event. 'One more push', almost the exact words the NSW Premier uses for…

That matches what I'd read, that it will only appear on the death certificate if it's had some immediate causal link to the death. But will see what the med folk say.

I guess words evolve. The new meaning of ‘alarmism’ appears to be ‘something that interrupts my lifestyle’.

RethinkX did a fascinating scenario report on the future of agriculture, and how precision fermentation in particular may almost completely remove the need for it. Quickly. Well worth your time. https://t.co/Fm8gWVrkBt…

Hey journos, how about a question to one of the experts who repeatedly tell you that Covid isn’t spread much in schools? To see which triple somersault with double twist new minimisation they can come up with. #auspol…

Med folk. I’ve read that vaccinated people will tend to show symptoms earlier, because their immune system is primed to recognise SARS2 infection. But being PCR tested while having strong symptoms should still be a pretty definitive test?…

The Carnot cycle for heat engines isn’t a bad way to think about Covid waves. Pistons going up and down by analogy are infections going up and down. But the down cycle is a recharging for the next up. Every part of the cycle continues the…

The debates about individual and collective rights to me begin in the wrong place. Like that joke about being given directions, 'well I wouldn't start from here'. All the talk about 'balancing' the two, or prioritising one over the other,…

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…

Social media is a set of beliefs, transformed into code. Most fundamentally, the belief that democracies operate by accumulating the opinions of 'the people', into some form of common will. Look around and see if you think that particular…

The film adaptation is running a bit long now, at nearly 3 years. And the script re-writes, where the community ignores the virus, death and suffering and goes back to its old lives, is a significant divergence from the book.…

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

I don’t think capitalism is even a thing. None of the -isms are. If capitalism is the private means of production, why do we have a Corporations Act, just for starters? https://t.co/XlkhEGqgUE

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…

I thought Series 8 of Game of Thrones was the worst ending to a story I’d ever seen. But this writing team’s Covid adaptation may surpass it. https://t.co/9RSfx3FCKN

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…

It’s not clear if the prominent health professionals advocating repeat infection were trained to think this, or whether their own sudden celebrity from talking bollocks is too seductive, so they can’t give it up. https://t.co/n76GQxvYgq

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…

While media attention is on deception in senior public positions, can we add medical and public health professionals advocating to let a pandemic virus spread in an uncontrolled way? #covid19aus https://t.co/b2KZugpmKe

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…

Politics is language. For example, why had it not occurred to us that the phrase ‘business as usual’ describes all of life as business?

All pandemics are social, from Day 1. Viruses don’t go viral, we spread them in our social activity. The main argument of the BMJ piece appears to be that pretending problems don’t exist has worked before, so that’s our best guide now.…

Have been following Far-UVC technology for a while. It appears to be hitting the mainstream (though I cast a wary eye at @CathNoakes who has steadied my enthusiasm before!). Could be a true game-changer. It’s not just air we need to think…

I forget who Tweeted this pic, sorry. For those who think ‘personal responsibility’ is the way out of the pandemic. They don’t believe it, it’s just a slogan to enable doing nothing. https://t.co/fJ4F1j8dNi

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.…

I’m trying to figure out if this thread is circular reasoning. The mystery to be solved is non-Covid excess deaths. Suggested solution is overloaded A&E. But why is A&E overloaded? https://t.co/NWJPGgAt16

The reason we don’t see stronger action against Covid. The mostly meaningless word ‘globalisation’ is the stripping away of all sovereignty and territorial and cultural definitions of society, and replacement by the unfettered flow of…

I think it’s vital to understand we’re not in a battle of one side of politics against another. It’s a battle between civilisation, and hijacking pirates masquerading as politicians (regulatory capture), who are pillaging our societies…

This 7th ending of the pandemic in Australia is headlining the Spring festival of stupid, starting in only a few days. Nothing like sunshine after a long winter to deactivate what little critical thought we have left.…

I think there’s an assumption that the huge Covid death burden this year was mostly aged care residents. But they’re barely 25% of the total. The other 75% were practising personal responsibility public health. Do not try this at home.…

I’ve just had a holiday, and unlike many my dream holiday is being at home. One of my greatest pleasures is to work ON my home, not just in the DIY sense but on ‘home-making’, making it an increasingly pleasant place to be. To me this is…

Who cares what Australians think about reality? This belief alone will ensure they DO rise. https://t.co/a18SekWEyo

NASA’s stunning Apollo photos are a reminder of a time when societies still had big, exciting, collective aims. Name even one ambition societies currently have, of this magnitude? Short 🧵 /1 https://t.co/ShW1F6Cqkj One of the most telling…

I’ve Tweeted a few times about how what we call the ‘Economy’ didn’t exist before the 1960s. And that it was actually designed as a substitute for society. Beth’s book it seems goes into this in a lot more detail, in the US. Humanity’s…

I think I said last week, if you want to beat Covid, get rid of football. You'd hate to think the PM supports this nonsense just so one of his beloved Rabbitohs can play this weekend. But nothing would surprise any more.…

Here's a great example of how the politics of the economy sucks us all in. The almost universal hatred of monopolies. A monopoly is just an economy of scale. The 'free market' will produce monopolies, because the free market is a myth. /1…

Which HCWs does the HSU represent, that a solution to losing pay is get infected, rather than fix sick leave? I thought global teaching unions' non-response to Covid was bad. We have a new winner. https://t.co/IPdahz6Xvw

For over 70 years there's been a research program to eliminate the common cold. The Covid minimisers like to say we need to live with Covid, because that's what we do for other infectious diseases. Horseshit, we fight them. /1 #covid19aus…

Freddie Mercury became an international idol wearing bikie's leathers and ballet shoes. A lesson for populist politicians. The thing that really turns the public on is not caring what people think. https://t.co/dsibdMJE7k

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

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

When economic thinkers hijack public health and make it a logistical operation to manage hospital capacity. Infection is illness. Mass infection is mass illness. Public unhealthiness. Infection is not only the definition of a pandemic,…

You could almost have hope reading this, that the freedumb narrative has an even higher power - 'life'. Sadly it appears to apply only to enforced pregnancy, and not preventing mass infection, morbidity and death. https://t.co/0jXwMhDOXY

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

Both think the problem with our politics is bad manners. They want ‘decency’ back. But those bad manners are the populist attack on ALL politics, by external parties. Deliberately weaponised propaganda, 24/7, to undermine civil society.…

Listening to the Covid minimising propaganda, you’d think staying at home, not travelling, or wearing a mask were some modern version of the Battle of the Somme. https://t.co/SIwOTzUGwr

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

We’re in the Commonwealth, the Queen is still our monarch. I think a public holiday for her death would be logical. The throne-thumping economic zealots in charge…let’s see how skin-deep their commitment is. Maybe her funeral should be the…

The pretty impressive results from UV air disinfection makes me think light itself should be a much bigger public health topic. It’s not just about air. It’s about the built environment, which is hugely about light too.

Lockdowns should always have been called sheltering, or shielding. To shelter from harm. Libertarian politics coined the word ‘lockdown’ to make sure everybody thought of it as oppression. Language is politics, all very deliberate. And it…

‘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…

Scratch the surface of most Covid minimisers, and you'll find somebody who thinks the purpose of human civilisation is their recreational travel. Or they own an airline.

I don't think it's possible to re-Tweet this one too many times. Australia didn't 'lock down for 2 years and then open up'. All that white space = most of the 2 years = no lockdowns. The longer periods towards the end were premature…

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

When the unchecked spread of a pandemic cripples the workforce of the people burying and burning the bodies. https://t.co/8Dxz11J0F9

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…

There’s some bitterness in me that I could have become a senior government adviser on big money just by saying ‘let 500 people die every week’. I thought it might need more training.

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…

I think we need to move on to the 'next phase' of a trillion dollars in debt, to just pretending we aren't.

Powerful thread. Experts and politicians who not only allowed but actively promoted infection in entire younger generations, will have questions to answer for many years to come. https://t.co/jfrrtsZ75E

An immune system is like a crumple zone on a car, it can stop you dying, but you don’t smash randomly into every car you see. It’s a last line of defence, after speed limits, driver training, road rules etc. ‘Natural’ healthers think it…

While technology is never simple determinism, gig economy software and also social media software were spawned in the highly libertarian environment of the US. They act as enablers of that social context when introduced in other countries,…

The irony of the criticism of ‘MSM’ by just about everybody, is that it ceased to exist some time ago. There is no mainstream. It’s a marketing trick to enlist recruits who feel alienated, by anything, to make them think they’re a special…

Central banks raise interest rates because whole societies now run on debt instead of savings. Why don't we save instead? Because we don't earn enough to save. Debt has been the way we've created an illusion of widespread prosperity.…

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.…

All societies have a constitution. Older societies we don’t understand did something that was pure genius. They included non-humans in their constitutions. Animals, plants, the landscape more generally. We think they’re being ‘spiritual’.…

Looking at those beached whales in Tasmania, and thinking, what sort of idiot species knowingly kills itself en masse? https://t.co/nkSAggUp6P

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

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.

You can read lots of definitions of what the ‘economy’ is. But if you pretend you’re an anthropologist studying another culture, it’s mostly just people driving around everywhere, for no apparent purpose.

‘Wanting to do the greater good no matter what’. Imagine thinking that was a criticism. https://t.co/npwnqUEUwF

When you use a chronic rather than acute disease lens, it almost reverses who’s ‘vulnerable’ to Covid. https://t.co/EZYgTMRpBC I saw it in connection with one of @yaneerbaryam’s Tweets, Yaneer do you know the source of the table? It was in…

h/t to all of those who fought so hard to infect the kids. You must be feeling nothing like the bottom-feeding arseholes people with a brain and a conscience think you are. https://t.co/KZUScLBLW5 h/t @MixtUpMixy

I was touched that the head of the CDC thought this might be too many deaths. https://t.co/IW5wCBKfeU

I think it’s worth repeating that ‘people are tired of Covid’ because people are doing all of the Covid work that governments and businesses are supposed to be doing.

Australian government spending as % of GDP. Politicians say that Covid spending couldn’t go on forever, but why is the choice government spending on public health, or nothing? Businesses are required by WHS law to prevent Covid spread.…

I used to think the US would be the place the nonsense of neoliberal/libertarian politics would implode under its own BS. But it has enough power and resources to continue the sleight of hand a bit longer. The UK is the new lab rat.…

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

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…

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

You may think they paused proceedings to take this group selfie. This is the proceedings. The health advice will be in those folders nobody will open. https://t.co/rXnb5gfI3N

@theprojecttv if not now, when? When the virus isn’t spreading throughout the whole community. You send the firefighters home when the fire is out. Grow a brain.

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…

The data suppression program isn’t helping much. At the red arrow it’s a bit like when you think the movie is over, and then suddenly there’s an extra bonus scene. For deaths, the credits seem a long way off. https://t.co/UmTbsXG35f

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

The UK Tories can even manage to ditch tax-cuts to the top end of town. Quickly, within a week of announcing them. I don’t think the ALP recognises what terminal brand damage they’re doing letting Covid rip, and delaying ditching the…

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

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

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

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

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…

Australians re-elected the LNP multiple times over the past 30 years on the back of staggering broken promises. The ALP are numpties, thinking being the good boys and girls of politics will shower them with votes. Biden similarly…

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…

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

So is Australia a rogue Covid state now? We don't even bother with WHO reporting, which to my knowledge is required under international law? Anywhere else we should be looking? #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/MmgvfISVUY

Under disability and anti-discrimination legislation in Australia, building owners are required to make their buildings accessible to those with a disability. What are they doing to cater for the ‘vulnerable’ for Covid? The same as they’re…

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

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…

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

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

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

The most powerful 4Corners I’ve seen for some time. Modern societies still run on cheap imported labour i.e. slavery. ‘Economy’ is just our modern re-branding. Covid exposed it. A combination of slavery and debt is what’s created our now…

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

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…

Have read much of the report now. There's lots that's good in here. But a private review of a public health emergency says everything that's wrong with the Western Covid response. Failures from 2021-on are mentioned but not really…

The triumph of economic, monetarist politics is to get everybody on all sides of politics to agree unthinkingly that the country is driven by a budget. That a country has to ‘buy’ its way of life. https://t.co/tdNtOTlAEY

Democracies cycling through ever more leaders, as our popularity-based politics inevitably fails. We’re so stuck in the headlights of populism that all we can think to do is to keep changing leaders, throwing more popularity on the…

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

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

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…

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

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…

The extraordinary thing Paul O’Neill did at Alcoa is something that should be our guide out of Covid. And a lot more besides. How worker safety is the key to economic success, but also to understanding how organisations work. /1…

I’m curious what activities the Infinite Covid crowd think are more important for society that keeping people from becoming sick, and dying?

“The reality is that this virus is simply behaving like every other known human virus in adapting to the host and becoming more transmissible and less virulent, so it can coexist and propagate itself better.” I’m sure I’ve read multiple…

The real and clear story here is that the 'protocols' are nonsense for preventing Covid spread. And they're more rigorous that what we use on land. The whole country is a public health train wreck. https://t.co/mZeB2pnLVX Or that should…

George Bernard Shaw used to argue that all people should be paid the same amount. In neoliberal times it horrifies people, because we think people are paid according to merit. You have to be some kind of stupid to think that’s true.…

When the NSW Government says something is 'over-engineered', think of all of the houses it allowed to be built on floodplains, because planning was apparently 'over-regulated'. Now structural engineering will be your personal…

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

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

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

Because they can. We need strong media regulation, including social media, which I think should probably be shut down. Libertarians use ‘free speech’ to pretend continuous propaganda doesn’t damage societies. They know it does, it’s why…

Great thread on the monetisation/financialisation of societies. Societies that succeed and last build stuff, they don’t just do card tricks with money. We ‘couldn’t afford’ to fight Covid because cash flow is our whole society, not stuff.…

In which a prominent Australian epidemiologist says we need to ‘ride’ Covid waves. Maybe it’s like a Covid theme park, and this is one of the rides. Silly me thought epidemiology was mostly there to stop continuous waves of disease.…

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

By #ZeroCovid I mean elimination of wide community spread. In the West we have a God complex where we assume reality will be what we choose it to be. #ZeroCovid is not a choice to make, it’s likely the only way our societies can survive.

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

The half-dozen people I know personally who’ve had unexplainable life-threatening medical episodes this week are still on the brink. Every day of their confused terror and their families’ suffering, I think of this photo. These grinning…

The comparisons I’ve seen try to redress HIV/AIDS denialism by suggesting the same minimisation at early stages of knowledge of the pathogen. In a ‘let’s not make that mistake again’ way. And both viruses seem to target similar parts of…

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.…

It all helps. But it still seems ridiculous that with all of our lauded expertise and knowledge, ‘let everybody get infected’ is still the best baseline we can come up with. Need to decouple that expertise and knowledge from the electoral…

Kelly says: "contribute to our collective effort to slow the spread of the virus". We're suppressing transmission now, collectively? I thought the strategy was mass infection to create 'rich hybrid immunity'? Serious question, this is a…

One of the most frustrating things in this pandemic is arguing to prevent widespread infection, because of the catastrophic effects it has on peoples’ lives. And realising the people opposing you are literally just trying to win debating…

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 still think it’s vital to say viruses never go viral.

Have a friend with recent onset Bells Palsy, and was looking at the research on connection between that and Covid infection. Any knowledgeable folk know what the current thinking is?

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

Watching the news, with members of the public expressing dismay that Covid is ‘back’. It’s great proof of the success of the propaganda campaign, that they thought it had gone away.

The NSW Premier rehashing his same fantasy slogan of staying home if you’re sick, and going to work if you’re not, for Covid. Completely ignoring asymptomatic spread, and finite sick leave. He needs to go.

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

The privatised pandemic. If we still had widespread PCR testing, and if we followed the advice of ‘stay home if we’re sick’ during these mass waves of infection, society would be ‘locked down’ in the same way as when we did that to prevent…

ATAGI was likely to implement new booster recommendations in early 2023 in preparation for winter. (Mark Butler.) To my knowledge Covid still isn't seasonal? Is the hope that if we keep talking about it like flu, it will become flu?

I thought ruthless suppression of data and information and endless cooker propaganda was doing it. Maybe that's what hybrid immunity is. https://t.co/uP4QgprpAU

For rank amateurs like me, these seem obvious questions about hybrid immunity as an approach to Covid: 1) other diseases which are said to use this model, like colds and flu, are much less dangerous diseases. Do we just accept that each…

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

Orwell saw all the puff around democracy and what it means. I don't think any of the -isms and -cracies even exist. No society is anywhere near organised enough to qualify as being a system of any kind at all. https://t.co/A0fLOswkWW

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…

Latour was writing about religion here, but also about all of society’s institutions. That feeling now of society collapsing? That’s the ‘ruins’ he’s talking about. ‘Once they’ve been destroyed, institutions don’t get back up’. There’s a…

This is the most powerful medicine humans have ever invented. Law. Easily the fastest, fairest and cheapest way to end this pandemic is regulation. Viruses need bodies to spread. Bodies are regulated by laws. Law is justice, not…

Australia deliberately modelled the mass infection of children it then carried out. We don’t even think about doing that for much less dangerous diseases that we vaccinate our kids against. Infection and sickness used to be considered…

Who thinks a government with years of runs on the board in workers' compensation mismanagement was ever going to prioritise Covid protections in the workplace? https://t.co/6TMt6W9Qh2

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…

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…

Language, not data. 'Living with the virus.' We live with crime, disasters, pain and suffering, poverty, injustice etc. The key thing is, how much. Living with Covid shouldn't mean everybody catching Covid 4 times a year. We live with…

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

Twitter is proof ‘the people’ don’t exist. Theoretically it’s a platform where everybody speaks. But like life outside Twitter, what gets read is only the tiniest fraction of what gets said. About 5% of Tweeters get read regularly.…

⁦@MichaelPascoe01⁩ is one of the few journalists paying attention to these collective disasters. On this topic, I don’t think we’ve given up. Societies don’t run themselves, they’re led. We’re being led to give up. https://t.co/SzTyKjoyli

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

Fact-checking with somebody who actually knows something about viral evolution. @TRyanGregory think you saw this clip, have we painted Covid into a mutation corner? https://t.co/JAeL6uAqx4

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

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…

Christian Drosten says the population getting infected multiple times is all that will end the pandemic, without mucosal vaccines. But on the other hand he (and others) say don't get infected if you can avoid it. I think this comes down to…

Karen’s forensic weekly dissection of the NSW epi report is a Twitter highlight for me. If you want one of the best windows into what’s really going on with Covid in the community, watch for this thread on Thursdays. https://t.co/XvSxb4ov1Z

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)…

A friend who had to be admitted to hospital with Covid because they couldn’t breathe responded with ‘it is what it is’. These adolescent slogans, or ‘You do You’, are how adolescents think. But that’s now our entire culture. Fatalism,…

Fatalism is a childhood philosophy linked to powerlessness I think. Because often children can’t do anything about things. The fact it’s now our adult philosophy of life shows how adolescence has become our dominant cultural model.

Who thinks infecting the entire population with SARS-Cov-2 is a bigger risk to 'our way of life' than sitting on a bridge? https://t.co/xAoElhd8BO

It's an almost perfect standard pandemic pattern, showing no signs of going away? And pandemics are defined by infections, not deaths. Infections. You'd think even one journalist would have worked that out by now. https://t.co/J7feLqFab3

Thoughts and prayers. Or how about we throw all of our current leaders in jail and leave public health to our public health teams? https://t.co/qdprYHI6wJ

If you only have time to read one Tweet thread per week, I'd make it one of Karen's. https://t.co/MJFi0HlT2N

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

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

Infection is a rising star in so many major chronic health conditions. I think it’s a paradigm for chronic disease that has a long way to run yet. https://t.co/heWO2vVqnq

I wonder if Victorians read the fine print on Dan’s ‘deal’. https://t.co/RmX4W6NkG7

I don’t think social media is an information platform. It’s a technology for mobilising groups, socially. It’s a libertarian operating system, which is why it’s accelerating the collapse of democracies. https://t.co/qnarZDVOsl

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…

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

This was Margaret Thatcher’s favourite show, because she thought it was about bureaucratic obstruction, that she despised. But it was a show about how that obstruction protects us from populist windbag politicians, like her.…

As journos join millions of other Australians in Covid-spreading Christmas parties, maybe they can share ideas for 2023 penance for the public health disaster they co-inflicted on the Australian community in 2021 and 2022, together with…

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

Finally on GBD, it was drafted at an American free-market think tank. Have a look at the articles on their site for the flavour of extreme libertarianism they endorse. This is now Australia’s public health policy. Under a LABOR government.…

We’re hopelessly vulnerable to basic political strategy. The UK Tories for example, battling domestic chaos, right now running a so-obvious distraction campaign against refugees, copied straight from the Oz playbook. The ‘evil people…

“If you are out and someone is wearing a mask, they are either anxious…[or] they’re vulnerable…or…they may be out and about with the virus”. Catherine Bennett, in today’s Guardian. Or they could be ordinary people trying not to catch or…

Before the end of 2021 in Australia, what was ‘locked down’ was SARS-Cov-2. We stopped it spreading widely. The propaganda victory of the libertarians is to substitute people, for the virus. We weren’t locking down people. Being at home is…

The word ‘lockdowns’ replaced ‘quarantine’. The difference is profound. Quarantine clearly implies that a pathogen is being locked up. Lockdowns implies people are. None of this was accidental. Neoliberal politics is almost entirely about…

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

Content moderation is social media trying to reinvent the institutions that used to regulate knowledge and information. It’s a very thin gruel as a replacement, hopeless. And often just algorithms anyway. Knowledge, like society, has never…

UK news yesterday, claims of this being the most ‘normal Christmas since the pandemic began’. More gaslighting rubbish. As a family currently having its Christmas ruined by having to manage Covid as a new house guest, the previous two were…

For Covid minimisers, the pandemic is not a novel and lethal virus spreading globally. It’s State intervention in economies. That’s what they see as the actual disaster. Our previous PM and the NSW Premier are in that camp.

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

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

A bit sidetracked with our own Covid Christmas guest last Friday. That’s 233 families with fewer presents to buy this year. Think of the Economy. https://t.co/AmmzcQDMZQ

Yesterday a friend posted to Facebook how they were feeling rubbish with a dose of Covid. Tonight’s picture is them dining out in a local restaurant. Personal responsibility public health.

This thread got some prominent attention. Does the US RSV data show what Michael says it does? The ‘immunity debt’ debate. https://t.co/wT9r7bOxw9

Conservatives think long-term. This is their long-term aim, to strip away anything ‘public’. And it’s not that they don’t want to fight Covid, they just don’t want the ‘State’ to gain importance. They privatised the pandemic.…

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…

A public health farce. Saying there’s real benefit in being reinfected, but please don’t get reinfected. In the context of a national strategy of ‘infect our way out of the pandemic’. But don’t get infected. https://t.co/dyuYVzRnfc

I have @NjbBari3 to thank for a revelation today. A couple of weeks ago I thought I’d contracted Covid, because my sense of taste started to go a bit wonky. But 2 PCRs and multiple RATs since that time, and nothing. Then I saw Noor mention…

This is the pressure cooker that blew open any attempt to control SARS-Cov-2. The obsessive need to travel. Understand why we can’t be settled, can’t be ‘home’, and I think we understand everything. What is the actual purpose of all of…

Another way to unpack the myth of ‘bottom up’ Covid victory. Countries, nations. Today the international community is thought of as made up of nations. But the international community pre-existed nations, who were invented at the Peace of…

I think powerful anti-virals might make inroads into many if not most chronic health conditions. https://t.co/my3btyTySP

Just as background to my earlier thread about Korean POWs. This is a direct quote from Major William E. Mayer from the U.S. Army Medical Corps. Mayer was commissioned to study the returned prisoners. See full quote at:…

Only people who know nothing about schools thought sending kids home was bad for them. https://t.co/WH9JUHhk1K

“I don't think it fundamentally would have reshaped the approach that Australia has taken to managing the virus this year.” James McCaw. We didn’t manage the virus this year. A free-market libertarian think tank wrote our Covid strategy.…

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’.…

Watching UK journalists applauding travel restrictions for travellers from China, to prevent Covid getting out of control again in the UK 🤔 Imagine a journalist thinking Covid is under control in the UK now, or at any time. Just…

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

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…

It’s stunning to look at the data and think, this IS the strategy. Not an error. This was intended. The Great Barrington Declaration, substituted for State-driven public health expertise. https://t.co/5zHMuzQuBd

So I guess 2023 is the year Covid ends. Again. Trying to think what my favourite ending to the pandemic has been.

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

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

I said in 2020 that political libertarians would use any vaccine developed to end public health measures in the pandemic. All the data will show you the explosion of cases and deaths here after vaccines were introduced. They use them as…

Only one drug left (which nearly all of us don’t qualify for anyway). Covid keeps evolving, fast, to escape our vaccines and drugs. Because we let it spread, and infect constantly. https://t.co/wkEX8VYcFR

Such a fun afternoon outraging the cookers, who think all of us agreeing to do something is impossible, except when that something is to do nothing.

Using the poor as human shields to protect your lifestyle is a real cooker innovation. ‘Our lifestyles will collapse if we don’t infect the poor’ is not the strong counter-argument cookers seem to think it is. https://t.co/yBLQPl6e3S

I often imagine what people without a home make of rich countries, who think being asked to stay home is authoritarian oppression. https://t.co/CsTiHqgVFk

Reality-based politics is the paradigm shift we need. With Covid, it’s not that we replaced public heath with nothing. No society can survive an uncontrolled pandemic. We privatised the public health work. This is fundamental to bypassing…

The thing that’s amused me the most about reactivating discussion about lockdowns, is the number of people who think they’re a crazy idea. But who think living with an uncontrolled pandemic is common sense. As I watch an Australia…

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

Applying this to say Spanish Flu, in Australia during that pandemic. About 40% of the population was said to be infected. The herd immunity threshold for that pandemic influenza was around 74%? So nowhere near sufficient to halt the virus?…

This thread is the sort of thinking that keeps me coming back to Twitter. Some serious questions here. https://t.co/1qQtKne1zx

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…

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…

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

Re-sharing, because I think along with engineering, this is the least disruptive way to make rapid and lasting progress against Covid. https://t.co/W4OHMWQU4D

I think one of the extras in Monty Python’s crack suicide squad in Life of Brian. https://t.co/8EgWGwg3Ge

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

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

The dry tinder mostly burned off now in the boomers, the fire spreading now into Gen X. And number of life-years lost much greater there, its not just deaths going up. https://t.co/XjqoqQxrVn

This is such a common comeback to pointing out more people died in 1 year of Covid in Australia than did during the entire Spanish Flu pandemic. It’s irrelevant that there are now more of us, unless you think we now have more ‘spares’.…

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

The structure of a platform like Twitter makes a lie of just about everything said about it, by all sides. Tweets are ruthlessly hierarchical. Those with many followers get much more attention and visibility than others. This probably…

An increase of 42.4% is bad, when the metric is death? Am I misreading it? https://t.co/DHLv51nTeN @juliette_io sorry, cut off the attribution to your fabulous site at https://t.co/IzVl6mbs0u

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

We should be grateful to Dr Gerrard, for saying out loud what National Cabinet refuses to say. That their entire strategy is based on hope, and theories of herd immunity that derive from a libertarian free-market political think tank.…

Australia and NZ showed how this could be done. It was the political libertarians in the UK and US who drove global spread, by deliberately obstructing public health action. Libertarianism is the cancerous politics of the privileged.…

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

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’…

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.…

And in a sign of how the ‘balanced’ economic approach to the pandemic really works, the news yesterday was full of emergency language about inflation being at 7.8%. And nothing about excess deaths running at 15%. https://t.co/FNnMVI9X4J

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

I think people under 50 have a lower mortality rate for just about everything? Except maybe car accidents. Never sure what the point being made is. https://t.co/hKMzzgrqmO

When you infect entire populations in ageing societies, there’s nobody left to do the work. If we’d used risk management instead of political ideology to manage a pandemic, this would have been obvious. https://t.co/eyxCNcqKUC Alt text…

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…

Edmund Burke is considered a founder of political conservatism. John Howard speaks of him fondly. But to read Burke is to see how much modern conservatism has misunderstood every word he said. A short 🧵on how his ideas could save us,…

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.…

I think this is going to be a cracking read. The material underpinnings of society is the massive shift we have to make in our thinking, to understand today. Keeping the lights on, more than who we vote for. Actor-network theory has been…

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…

In the space of 2 years we went from being a public health powerhouse, to widespread vaccine hesitancy. That shift was led. https://t.co/DBJhraxhM9

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…

The previous government knew all of this, but still thought the pressing public policy issue was $120 billion of tax cuts to people who don’t need them. After 30 years of John Howard-instigated assault on all things public, it’s make or…

We’re probably 50 years too late to rescue the public from political libertarians. They have a big head-start, in destroying it. Every day I see people here desperately trying to come to terms with the loss of a public, that whole…

Thoughts from Spinoza in these difficult times. “The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free…Do not weep. Do not wax indignant. Understand.” https://t.co/OPPPG1tlHf

Arijit’s wonderful thread made me think about how Covid minimisers say our choice is to do everything to stop Covid, or nothing. The idea of just doing something is ignored. The public of public health is not mono-dimensional, there are…

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…

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

Orwell would give up I think, reality surpasses fiction. https://t.co/bi02dRVnUl

We’re at Yes Minister’s 4th stage of denial with energy as well as Covid. Where the deliberate blockers of essential public infrastructure and administration now use the results of that blocking to argue against fixing the damage, saying…

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…

The current drama over interest rates and inflation is another legacy of the neoliberal/libertarian ascendancy since the 1970s. The idea that the money supply is pivotal to economies was N=1 politics trying to turn societies into…

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

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

The ‘wall of immunity’ seems to divide even sane expert communities. Some say it’s a fantasy, others (including our most senior health advisers) say they’re confident it’s happening and is our way out of the pandemic. Two things about…

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

Thanks to @djf0001 for this amazing image from the first year of the pandemic in the US. Over a million body bags since then. You’d have to think the people who physically process those would have a view about living with the virus. (Ivan…

My favourite portrait of Spinoza. His excommunication was brutal, he was never accepted again by his community. But his conviction, that only knowledge and understanding can ever set humans free, remained unmoved. This portrait is such a…

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

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

By my reading, there have been more than 1000 Australians in hospital for Covid in Australia every day since 27 December 2021? Graph ends 3 Feb but there are still more than 1000 today, I believe. https://t.co/UNkb5SYh2Q

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

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

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…

A one-Tweet summary of my earlier longer thread. If you (the RBA) do all the right ‘economic’ things, and all it does is screw ordinary people, how long until people realise that’s the actual function of the economy? https://t.co/QCRHkUjiUE

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

Hive mind question. I can get a Moderna bivalent 5th dose this week. But the pharmacist rang to say the Pfizer update bivalent (B.4/B.5?) will be arriving second week of March. Risk - I could catch in the 3 weeks (wife and kids in…

Fascinating that the people who loudly proclaim they ‘do their own research’ so often have identical ideas, expressed in identical language. What are the odds.

The more I read about vaccines, the more important the annual flu shot seems. And for reasons well beyond flu.

I’m always touched when the belief system that let Covid spread unchecked to the developing world, and to poor workers in our own societies, now uses the impossibility of them defending themselves from the virus to say the only ‘practical…

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…

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…

No, it’s always meant reaching an immune threshold where SPREAD was prevented. Look up the definitions, they haven’t changed. Just as a pandemic continues to be defined by number of INFECTIONS. Not hospitalisations, or deaths.…

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

We’re all wedged between one group who think vaccines do nothing and another who think they do everything. We need ‘something’ people to run our pandemic response, not everything/nothing people.

Because ideas and beliefs precisely map social groups, it’s worth noting I think that both anti-vaxxers and Infinite Covids have converged upon ‘natural infection’ as the way out of the pandemic.

Waleed has written a very interesting piece here that overlaps with some of the things I Tweet about. It sometimes feels like we’re in a new age of puritanism, with the collapse of ordinary community-based political life shadowed by a…

For those who think electing independents saves electoral democracy from the laughable disaster it is. Exhibit A for the prosecution. https://t.co/jCCiow5YP9

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

Suppressing Covid data is authoritarian? I thought it was ‘the end of Covid exceptionalism’? https://t.co/7zRFtjAZ27

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

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

Reading the most recent seroprevalence data for Australia shows huge antibody levels in the population, near 100% for spike protein antibodies. When does herd immunity start?

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

I’d recommend everybody read the national public health guidelines for management of Covid, and compare with what they see actually happening around them. ‘What else could we do?’, minimisers often ask. This, what we’re already supposed to…

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…

Jazz is a bit of an enigma in some ways, it escapes easy definition. Which suggests there’s maybe something being missed. And maybe that something extends to a lot of the problems we have around identity and politics. Bit of a 🧵. /1…

The 50-year long assault on taxation, under cover of libertarian nonsense about freedom, had one clear goal. To relieve the wealthy of their social obligations. This thread is a home-run of numbers to ram the point home.…

More evidence of how ‘the economy’ shapes society. Note that with Auspost’s troubles, at no time does even the ALP shift from the cost-recovery model in its thinking. It has to be run like a business, the conservatives win again.…

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…

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…

We began the pandemic thinking epidemiologists would cut through political Covid spin. But it needed the actuaries to do that. https://t.co/VZpy2mdfK1

A common idea is that societies or groups are the sum of their parts. Like adding millions of identical points, to create a whole. Or instead we say ‘the whole is greater than the sum of the parts’. But neither of those ideas explains…

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

Read this. How popularly elected fatuous idiots destroy societies, by undermining the expertise that is supposed to actually run them. Utterly disgusting. Flood damage is caused by the corruption of these fatuous idiots, in bed with…

The world isn’t run or saved by Left and Right politics, or by the politics of identity. It revolves around engineering, and the materials it uses to sustain us. Narcissistic culture wars aren’t aware of this, which is why @EdConwaySky’s…

Always a critical thread, with each update. Imagine a team of leaders overseeing the death of 20,000 Australians in a year, and it’s not the biggest story every day. https://t.co/xRABNyENws

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…

What’s the current thinking/data on minimum exposure time for transmission of Covid? Obviously highly contextual too, indoors vs outdoors, degree of immunity etc. But just any current research or thinking.

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…

In words, ‘we’ll have that JobKeeper money back, thanks peasants.’ https://t.co/u8Fsf9qR0O

Word. Whole thread is excellent, though I disagree we need to ‘educate the public’ more. We need the public involved a whole lot LESS in most things. They’re only involved because our institutions are under assault. https://t.co/W38Jef6ENo

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…

I like that the actuaries have forced at least some sort of acknowledgement of the magnitude of what’s going on. Nobody else has been listened to. https://t.co/pYwP2wHUyT

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…

This is what those who called loudest for freedom from Covid protections do every day. Talk about Covid on Twitter. All day. Every day. There’s a panic about it, they can’t move away from the light. Trying to convince themselves I think,…

Watching the Rich Hybrid Immunity Awards red carpet. Are rock stars or movie stars more contemptuous of the public, in a pandemic? I think rock stars infect more of them. Swooping into towns, filling stadiums with fresh hosts, trousering…

Gigi Foster, Q&A last night. The politics of the economy will always refuse to acknowledge that letting everybody catch a lethal virus will kill lots of people. https://t.co/grVenzsWJY

Most local government areas in Australia are starved of money to provide basic resources. While we give hundreds of billions in tax cuts, and to buy the US a missile delivery platform in the Indo-Pacific. Those lunacies aside, a thought…

@bmarsalis thoughts? https://t.co/yyAwYdLUql

Thanks to @RichardfromSyd1 for alerting me to this one. Haven’t read it yet, but I obviously Tweet a lot about how the market and the economy itself are myths. Deliberately constructed myths. To replace society with old-style feudalism.…

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…

Great thread for those who believe in the service economy. As Cory says, the real process has been transferring value ‘from those who make things for a living to those who own things for a living’. https://t.co/o4kyY2CI6I

Something minimisers could learn from the IPCC report is the humility of grading assertions on a continuum of confidence (low - medium-high-very high). Minimisers have been certain since Day 1 of the pandemic that to do nothing is the…

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 entire country now under ALP rule. I don’t think we should discount demographics, which determines so much of what we attribute to politics. The traditional demographic of the LNP is shuffling off the mortal coil.

If concerts spread Covid? Simple, don’t go. Except the people who do go turn up in your schools and workplaces, the next day, to spread infection. ‘You do you’ assumes Australia is 25 million separate mini-societies, independent of one…

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

The gap between discovering multiple sclerosis as a chronic disease, and identifying its infectious origins, was about 150 years. And we think Long Covid is as bad as it might get.

The reason politics looks so ‘polarised’ is because we’re using our social structures to make decisions. That’s what social media has accelerated hugely. Decisions that should be straightforward, practical jobs to get done, now have to…

Immunity may be the wrong model to deal with infectious disease. Domestication is the right one, I suspect. There are powerful insights in Ewald’s work. Immunity alone strips away the entire ecological context of host and pathogen. /1…

This is such an important topic. Are infections which cause significant and relatively long-lasting immunity actually rare as hen’s teeth? The two most evoked examples, cold and flu viruses, seem to create little if any immunity. Have a…

Life in a sloganocracy. Hit me again this week, reading debates about infection-driven immunity, or ‘exposure’ immunity, hybrid immunity etc. In a sloganocracy, what guides community life is no longer government and its associated…

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…

We’re worried about AI taking over the world. On the basis of its intelligence. But not worried that the world is currently run by grifting buffoons, based on popularity.

The atomic unity of society is not the individual. It’s the household. Economy politics replaces society with a market, made up of independent, mobile workers, decoupled from place. But that’s not how most people live. The economy wants…

One of my pet Tweet topics, how social conformity is the glue that holds societies together, not politics. I think the percentage is more like 95% who will follow, 5% will lead, based on empirical evidence like the Korean POW camps in the…

The job is the economy’s way of controlling the flow of social resources. It’s a social invention, not economic. We stopped fighting Covid because jobs and viruses mostly don’t mix. Until we remove the job as the foundation of social life,…

The danger remains not that people think stupid things. It’s that they’re encouraged to think at all about things, that previously they gave no thought to at all. We’re hacking society’s operating systems. https://t.co/8dexlbItPU

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…

We need to constantly highlight that our Covid strategy was written by an extreme libertarian free market think tank. Word-for-word. I’d still be interested to be shown any public health text or set of guidelines that has ever resembled…

More politics with words. ‘Hybrid immunity’. Most meanings of the word immunity mean to be resistant to infection. But the politics of Covid has again subtly revolved around words, and transformed it into ‘having less severe disease’. I’m…

Reading different interpretations of what’s going on with Covid. What swings it is the actual reality of what’s happening. 20,000 dead in a year, in Australia. Those who were in charge of our response in 2022 got something seriously wrong.…

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

This is the most recent WHO statement on hybrid immunity for Covid that I can find, from mid-2022. (Would be interested to know if there’s a later one.) What stands out is that the WHO is not at all sure it’s the way out of this pandemic.…

The way social media dramatically accelerates social collapse is maybe more obvious for issues like climate change and Covid. But a nice example today of the corrosive damage it does across the board. Was speaking with an insurer and…

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…

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

From last year. When politicians talk about ‘independence’, like the RBA setting interest rates or the Remuneration Tribunal setting politician pay, they mean something that: - benefits them - is deeply unpopular. So they fabricate an…

I think it may be about time for a cost-benefit analysis on economics itself. Catastrophically irrelevant to just about everything. https://t.co/1AEcj895KF

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

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’…

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.…

I think it must be the crown and the moustache. Peas in a pod. https://t.co/2gfUhBIgZE

My 80-year old mother targeted by cybercrime today. Think she's ok. Anybody else noticing this stuff ramping up? Courtesy of the Silicon Valley libertarians and their rubbish software and hardware, developed with 'freedom of the…

Probably the first time in decades that political decisions have followed the desires of the young. Politicians always follow the numbers. There's now more young than old voters. https://t.co/3UVJrcYX3b Incidentally I think the young are…

Intelligence has always been a distributed thing. The whole paradigm of AI is like libertarianism, for the mind. Most of our use of language for example has been AI, forever. The meanings are collectively generated, outside our heads, and…

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…

I think the model of society as millions of people consuming information is wrong. We live in representative democracies, they're designed so that most people don't need to know anything about how things work. It's the representative bit…

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 COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the urgency of understanding the underlying mechanisms, both to reduce risks in adults with existing CVD or with acute viral infections, and also to minimize longer-term consequences from…

The problem with much chronic disease research is that there are no good conceptual models, to guide the collection of ‘scientific data’. So ‘anecdotal’ evidence is what you have. Think of all the years ME/CFS sufferers have been told it’s…

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…

A Covid strategy of vaccination and protecting the vulnerable, where you don’t vaccinate, and don’t protect the vulnerable. In other words, just a big fat lie. https://t.co/EL9EjHzaPx

When ‘live with the virus’ became the guiding idiocy of this pandemic, conceptually we should probably have shifted from immunity as the guiding principle, towards symbiotic classification. Ecological relationships. How you live with…

The ALP spent 10 years in the political wilderness not developing one obvious strategy to push through desperately needed public policy. Instead they waited 10 years for the LNP to fall over. Shorten tried to introduce major reform, but…

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

While I think the economy is a myth, a re-badging of society, we could get much more sensible public discussion if we could at least distinguish between the budget and the economy. All of the talk of 'finding the money' for things is…

Sometimes you feel the worm is turning. A friend yesterday commented on my mask, saying they were thinking of putting one on again, they’re sick of being sick.

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…

Worth reading this analysis every week, never let the facts disappear out of neglect. https://t.co/43r44h8Wv9

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…

If I ran the world, I'd look at these numbers and think 'o dear, we need to fund a new football stadium'. https://t.co/qhMUGwSEF4

It’s amusing the hysteria around artificial intelligence, at a time of mass ‘natural’ stupidity. I’d replace any government in the world right now with ChatGPT, in a heartbeat. https://t.co/C4SlnT9DwZ

Most of the fear around AI seems traceable back to a few Hollywood movies. That’s about as deep as culture is now. As if intelligence, of any form, could ever be a threat. Stupidity is the threat.

It might take just one question to National Cabinet to shift Covid gears. Let’s keep asking. Why is our Covid ‘strategy’ word-for-word a manifesto from a libertarian free-market think tank? #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/ZZ2t5lSsZg

Anybody who believes that democracy functions or should function by ‘the people’ steering our society should read the comments on this (great) thread. Then block all the morons, to do your small part in sanitising this sewer of a platform.…

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,…

There’s nervousness amongst some air quality professionals, about far-UV. I think upper room UV is more accepted. Either way we don’t hear very much about UV options in Australia? They’re apparently extremely effective, and almost set and…

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…

I think it was David Suzuki who said that you can't see the economy from space. It says everything you need to know about it.

The AI stories are still full of contradictions. Our greatest threat right now is stupidity. Intelligence is not a threat, it’s desperately needed. We’ve had over 3 years of evidence now with Covid that humans couldn’t run a lemonade…

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…

Humans are built to notice and be concerned about contrasts, not absolutes. For example you perceive a change in temperature or smell, then become accustomed. This is where normalising Covid infection got its power. By drawing upon a…

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…

Because it’s a Kings sort of day, this excerpt from Dave Graeber and Marshall Sahlins, two late prominent anthropologists, gives a sense of how simple-minded our thinking on governance mostly is. Even what we think of as democracy, ‘the…

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

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…

The public is following politicians for Covid advice, the same politicians surveys say they think lie consistently. The same politicians who won't mandate their own official health advice. Health advice undermined by rogue health…

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

Travel and toxoplasmosis both start with a T. I think that explains the similar mechanism of a brain rendered insensitive to danger. A friend went on a cruise late last year, got horribly sick, was off for weeks. Now just returned from…

It's dangerous to think most of the problems we face emanate in the public service. There's been a concerted campaign to politicise the PS for 50 years. I encourage people to read about the Robodebt RC, what came out.

People can cry, laugh or gasp reading a book. Ink on paper. And yet the idea of AI creating meaningful interaction strikes them as artificial.

Obviously a better budget than anything the gas industry dressed as LNP pollies ever put together. But a real disappointment on electrification. Only 110,000 households will get access to loans to electrify i.e. they still pay. 3.8 million…

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

Google search was already a very special kind of AI, but not of the type that’s now being talked about a lot. It’s why its search was always so uncannily good. A collective intelligence technology, almost forgotten in the drivel now spoken…

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…

Can anybody else think of a pathogen using our bodies right now as an airbnb? Or sorry, dirtyairbnb? https://t.co/0Yeku8ru4O

If you're going to adopt a free market think tank's template Covid strategy of protecting the vulnerable, you have to protect the vulnerable. And you can't anyway. Because they're fully connected to the rest of us. https://t.co/Do8m7M5PRq

Walk into any workplace right now providing a core social service, and you’ll leave knowing everything is collapsing. Staff smashed by Covid and secondary infections, staff resigning and unable to be replaced, taking critical knowledge…

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…

If you’re reading, National Cabinet. Now that you’re all Labor, minus one Liberal Premier in free fall. With a big lead in all polls. If you can’t do basic public health now, it’s obvious it’s all about your individual careers, not the…

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…

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…

I've been a heavy user of social media. But I now think the fastest and maybe only way we can save societies, is to shut it down. Have Tweeted lots about the basic premise of social media, that societies emerge from the 'bottom up'. They…

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

This person is putting words in my mouth and bores me. People who invent their own straw-man enemies, well - that's social media in a nutshell. https://t.co/bzdsaQ4giI

I think I’m going backwards with followers. This is the best visual metaphor I can think of to describe social media. The liquid is the public. The bubbles are all the tiny individuals and groups social media generates. Each seeing all of…

My criticism of social media is a criticism of the founding beliefs that created it. Here they are in plain view, from the infamous AIER. The home of the GBD. Democracies do NOT emerge from the ‘bottom’ up’ That’s a libertarian fantasy. /1…

Where do people think the misinformation and attacks on trust predominantly come from? Social media is NOT social networking. It's the monetisation and weaponisation of social networking. https://t.co/ikd0A7i2w5 via @ABCaustralia

This morning Noel Pearson described Yes Minister as a show where the Minister was obstructed by the bureaucrat. The writers of that show must tear their hair out. The politicians in it are self-serving, vain imbeciles. Like ours.…

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…

“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…

I’ve seen research that says humidity is a powerful weapon against Covid-19 spread. And research that says the exact opposite. This set of results was very interesting. https://t.co/9vOhjiIOhX @DrPieterPeach what’s your take on humidity as…

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

This is the reading in the main living room with no windows open, reverse-cycle heating and in a well insulated home. (Upper-wall vents.) 5 people. It’s very cold and windy outside. I do have one window open (tilt) at either end of the…

Rock/pop music culture has been a dominant force in extending adolescent culture into the entire human lifespan. Live Aid for example was a failure, but even more showed how kiddults thought we should fix world problems. By our favourite…

To reiterate this from yesterday. Using this logic we would never have had widespread vaccination against polio? https://t.co/nRWWid6VaP

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.…

A termitarium does something astonishing. It dissolves the distinction between inside and outside. It’s beautifully ventilated, but also protective from the elements, and maintains a stable temperature. It repurposes air and water as…

Boils aren’t a popular topic for discussion, but they’re horrible for many people. A long conversation with an afflicted friend made me think much wider things, about Covid and infection more generally. About microbes as an ecology. We…

Ouch. Lucky those waves are getting smaller and smaller, just 'grinding along' I think was the phrase used yesterday. You'd need two buses for 69 people, by law. https://t.co/uql7P3VpuT

I wouldn't be fooled into thinking this is anything about the pandemic we're still in. It's softening us all up to do nothing for the next one. https://t.co/r5BImk1bf4

Great thread. Also so important to note that we never stopped ‘locking down’. We privatised it. Instead of government and business paying to prevent infection, now individuals do, with their own sick leave. A society CANNOT function with a…

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

This is the pattern we see on social media, across all topics. Widespread segregation. It’s no coincidence that many social media platforms were developed in the US. It codes their underlying libertarian belief systems.…

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.…

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…

Victoria was the unrest that scared populist windbags in government the most, with Covid action. Put that in the context of most Covid and vaccine disinformation emanating from only about a dozen people, globally. It was an astronomical…

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

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

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

One of the few people actually at work this week and not sick rested near my desk while walking past, and said ‘I’m so exhausted’. Not because of work, they have a desk job. Because of (they think) their Covid infections. Like a nation of…

A story about gravity. A little bit of pure science, but with profound implications for everyday life I think. And joy, which true knowledge brings. Nothing restricts a person’s life more, in my view, than a misunderstanding of gravity.…

Only the most privileged and out-of-touch societies could make staying at home - ‘lockdowns’ - into a disaster. Imagine finding your own home an oppression. It’s not what the people I leave work with on a Friday are thinking. All smiles.

The Torygraph in the UK. Let’s celebrate State-funded lockdowns, and send thoughts and prayers to the libertarian loons who find them offensive. It beats privatised lockdowns we’re now paying for ourselves. https://t.co/p2m9nsMUCl

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

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

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

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

I think a quick fix here would be $300 billion+ worth of nuclear submarines, and about $200 billion in tax cuts to the top end of town. https://t.co/9UAD5dRXs5

A cooker ex-friend constantly asks me 'so what would you do about Covid?' I say: "control the spread, like we do for every other serious infectious disease." Cookers bait you to say 'lockdowns'. They're a bit taken aback when you say…

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…

The -ism words are so misleading. Take 'authoritarianism'. Libertarians mean State power. Removing public health measures so that the public is forcibly infected with a virus is the most authoritarian decision possible. The public is left…

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

Lucky people over 90 aren't vulnerable to Covid. We're protecting the vulnerable, I read it in the paper. From this week's NSW epi report. https://t.co/gfukhlXLze

Nearly everybody accepts the economy exists. Nearly everybody doesn’t realise it’s just a graph. That dreaded inflation? An emergency for the economy, because that price point where P0 meets B and A is the equilibrium point of the perfect…

Maybe Brett got tired of reading all the Covid research National Cabinet members found on YouTube. Or "it's ok Brett, we have the Great Barrington Declaration now, we don't need CHOs." https://t.co/zLzN6ICHVb

"I think we’ve stuck the fork of human frailty into the sparking light socket of social media enough times now to know that it’s not entirely good for us." John Birmingham

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

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…

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

If you’re 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.…

A P.S. I don’t think people get this. Public health was the product of national governments. ‘The public’ itself is. As the economy replaces those with a globalised market, public health disappears too. It was the logical next step. You…

Names change, but hierarchies don’t. Democracy’s weakest point is misunderstanding this and thinking it levels the hierarchies. All social systems are hierarchies, because all social behaviour is hierarchical. Status, comparison,…

Shameless plug here for @EdConwaySky’s book. Out this week. Part of a big shift we need in our thinking about the world’s problems, away from schoolyard debate and towards material realities. A new industrial revolution, to fix our biggest…

We can do symbolic disaster. Something where we can make a statement, that is more about us. Provided the disaster doesn’t continue on and require actual thought and action. Like a pandemic. We use disaster as a stage for performative…

I forget what date Karen said this, but it still makes me chuckle. Nothing beats actual knowledge. https://t.co/axEIGRMvw8

It's easy to think ordinary people are ignoring the impact of Covid. But consistently I find they have genuinely no idea of the number of infections and deaths occurring. Genuine shock when you tell them. It doesn't often make them change…

Our national Covid strategy violates every one of these clear scientific facts. As icing on the cake, more than 21,000 people have died in under 2 years, and no politician even acknowledges it. Not even a ‘sorry for your loss’. That would…

Politicians will talk about death and other bad things, if they think it can’t be linked back to them, and thus their votes. Selective, strategic attention. If we want them to use any other metric except popularity, we need to stop that…

Thankfully we went with the evidence-based 'let's let a pandemic virus infect everybody' instead, based on a single page manifesto from a free market think tank. https://t.co/MRHeUr0Wrx

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

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

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’d say reasonable effort is being made to protect ‘the vulnerable’. The real problem is thinking you can ring-fence them off from the rest of the community. Society is always a mixture, it doesn’t function as separated groups.…

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…

This is how social media more generally works. It opens to ‘debate’ the entire operating system of societies. Things people have not only no knowledge of, but didn’t even know existed, suddenly become weaponised topics of ‘debate’. It…

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 is the centrism nonsense that has been progressive politics’ own goal for decades. There is no political centre, it’s a relative position between wherever Left and Right happen to be at any point in time. Right now the centre thinks…

Seeing lots of good people having Twitter holidays. Like fighting some sort of fight achieves something here. I don’t think it does. That’s the bullshit side of social media, the team sports. Knowledge is all that changes the world. Ignore…

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…

There’s only one way knowledge and expertise has ever had political power. By the invention of a public or civil service. Ask Archimedes. The reason our greatest scientists on Covid and climate are ignored by politicians is that…

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

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

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…

Phew, some of that 278 died last week. That’s OK then. Maybe only 3 busloads this week. But think of the easing of pressure on aged care staffing. https://t.co/TRLX0FaITy

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…

I often think that the perfect way to feel the stranglehold popularity politics has over reality is best seen in the way humans actually argue whether to turn sand, wind and sunshine into renewable, clean energy. Pause and think how insane…

Using technology like Google and Apple Maps, you can now see any place on Earth from the comfort of your lounge, at any scale from ground level up to the view from orbit. But at the same time, these same sights are collapsing under the…

The whole thread is so important. And the work Paul Ewald has been doing for years on the infectious causes of chronic disease. https://t.co/HuRaIj1Vkd

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…

I’ve never enjoyed this sort of crowd. You can’t see or hear anything much, and if you need to go to the toilet, good luck. Canetti thought crowds allow us to discharge our intense dislike of being touched by strangers. It’s never been a…

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

What’s increasingly obvious in this pandemic is that experts are just as clueless about how knowledge shapes societies as people who know nothing at all. Knowledge shapes societies in only two ways. Through teaching, and public…

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…

The politicians who attacked the ICAC findings today and at other times? It’s an independent body, public criticism of it undermines the whole basis of democracy. They should be sacked. If you think that’s too strong, try attacking the…

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

I Tweeted this yesterday without explanation. Much of the public knows nothing about public health. All it saw was politicians applying public health orders. When the orders were removed they thought the pandemic was over. But orders are…

The bigger and more roads you have, the greater the traffic. Supply induces demand. Just as building dams increases the demand for water. Supply and demand is the sole explanation market-based thinking has for group behaviour. It’s…

The most numerous occupants of Australia’s vast interior now are feral camels, feral goats, boomers towing caravans, and jocks in 4WDs ‘conquering’ it. When you can escape the boomers and jocks, and allow the stillness there to encompass…

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…

I’ve had employers say to my face when pressed on this sort of thing ‘we need to learn to live with this thing’. What THEY mean by that is ‘we need to allow everybody to get infected, there is no other way’. In other words, not living with…

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,…

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…

Libertarian beliefs impact society in all sorts of places we don’t think to look. The tidal wave assault on all forms of authority, the destruction of hierarchies of trust. https://t.co/k9Msrc9iDC

We’re a promiscuous culture. Not sexually. We’re promiscuous with place. This is a common sight in the ‘outback’. If we’re not flying overseas to promiscuously consume the places there, we’re doing the ‘big lap’ of our own country. What…

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

The reason I’m on Twitter was years of frustration with Facebook. Facebook doesn’t discuss, in my experience, you’re firing ideas into a void there mostly. But over time I’ve come to see it a bit differently, and also as a possible…

In some ways Musk is actually correct about social media. Its worst characteristics come from anonymity, from the decoupling from real community life. That enables and excuses sociopathic behaviour. Opinions without consequences, without…

Fascinating ideas. A medium of exchange that rots like potatoes, well worth thinking about. https://t.co/6NTDwbrtmq

The evolutionary biology I’ve seen applied to Covid here in the past 3+ years seems firmly in the modern synthesis paradigm i.e. evolution = natural selection of random genetic mutations. Besides being wrong, I think it’s created dangerous…

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…

Saying Covid is a Class 3 Biohazard (more a laboratory classification) isn’t as powerful I think as noting it’s a Category 2, 3 AND 4 condition in the NSW Public Health Act. Being in public with a known Category 2, 3 or 4 condition without…

Until late-2021, community spread was well controlled in Australia. At about the red cross or just before, a handover should have taken place. To WHS, to maintain that control. It never happened, instead we shifted to ‘personal…

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

Zuckerberg quote. Social media will never achieve this, on any platform. Its operational model is libertarian philosophy, that societies function from the ‘bottom up’. They don’t. The platforms erase generations of mediated knowledge and…

Just another heads-up for anybody on Threads that this account isn’t me. I’m not on Threads. Those going there because they think it’ll be some new dawn? It took all of a day for this bullshit to get started. https://t.co/R9cRGojjLO

The most dangerous mythology of social media is that it’s an unalloyed good for all people to be allowed to express their views on all topics, in public spaces. Mythologies about democracy make this one very popular. /1 Like generations of…

And again from Threads. I think you can compare the output from the two accounts to figure out where the BS is here. Not least because the Threads posts mock my longstanding views published to Twitter. https://t.co/5lRaKN8Fq5

Fantastic resource. Also a window into a time not that long ago, when calm passion for knowledge was a hit for kids. Now social media has turned their lives into hysterical battles over their own identity. Identity is a libertarian…

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…

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…

Thinking back to the Black Summer bushfires, I’m sure we’re all relieved we’re back looking after the economy. I think there’s a pandemic in there somewhere too. But let’s talk about interest rates and productivity. https://t.co/eB364kFdSs

Helen’s question is a good one. Ask yourself in what other ways current leaders have your back, and I think it’ll be become clear that Covid is just the latest in a long line of examples of how government has long since given up serving…

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

The hopeless moderation and regulation of these platforms, the sociopaths who destroy them. Thanks to Twitter, amazingly for acting within a day, on a weekend, to take down an account blatantly posting details of peoples’ personal lives…

Those who want to be activists for Covid action could simply refuse to hop on a plane, to anywhere. That will strongly limit spread of the virus, and also address climate change, in one action. I guarantee the idiot passion to travel will…

We’re obsessed with ‘being there’. Travel is just one aspect of this wider cultural framework. Our relationship to place carries with it an assumption of what place means, and for us it means ‘being there’. But it’s not actually clear what…

Hadn’t watched this until recently. Enjoyed it, social media and electoral politics destroy the world. Smart writers. https://t.co/bj8ZjvRjIN

The benefit of air quality monitors is that they make the situation visible. Today I showed the readings to a session convenor, who was actually shocked at the difference between the reading when we arrived and mid-session. It was enough…

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…

If it goes down, I would hope it forces a rethink on the value of voting to achieve complex and urgent social reforms. But it won’t. https://t.co/pxZM9Dr6Yb

My workplace has pretty good ventilation, regular CO2 readings of around 750ppm. I also mask and have a HEPA filter. Sometimes I wonder about the mask, whether the good ventilation and HEPA filter are enough, at least while sitting at my…

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…

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

I want to use Covid to reframe how we see social media. And human social life too, at the same time. I want to argue that despite all the talk about ‘division’ in the world, social media is the greatest engine of ‘furious agreement’.…

I do a one-Tweet version of my threads. For today’s, do we tweet these facts to share the facts? Or are we really asking why nobody is paying attention to them? I think the latter. We’re looking for (or trying to create) a social…

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…

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

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…

Can you think of one human thought, behaviour, feeling, word/phrase, object or trend/fashion that isn't copied/imitated from somebody else? https://t.co/EPuDKmkI0Z

Thinking who we vote for will make a difference to any major problem is like thinking your football team winning will restore the Murray-Darling Basin. Not an analogy. Both team sports with no connection to reality. https://t.co/FFKcQI1ule

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…

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

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

B A Van Sise. I challenge anybody to demonstrate an entirely original piece of work, or thought, or feeling. Or anything. AI shows again that the most fundamental human act is to copy. To imitate. https://t.co/64pl5uuMXp

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

I find myself even less interested in public 'debates' every day I'm year. Which means not triggering the usual topics that fire up responses and followers in the daily team sports. It's an illusion to think those are the pathway to…

Such a graphic example of populism vs reality politics. Kyle is immensely popular. Why do we think popularity can ever be a mechanism for selecting ultimate authority in a society? It always - there are no exceptions - leads to social…

‘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…

Should be read in conjunction with this piece by @GeorgeMonbiot on the fundamentally anti-social force that cars are. Which for a party that doesn't believe in society is par for the course. https://t.co/qYwK1ZgA3C https://t.co/9sLMCjfiJp

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…

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

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…

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

Thanks to @_PH___PH_ for sharing this thread of Kevin Anderson talking about how we misconceive climate change (and I would say Covid too) as something we’re all doing. Most of us are not doing it. I’ve Tweeted for years how talk of ‘the…

Nobody originally thought glandular fever could lead to multiple sclerosis. It even had a cute name, the ‘kissing disease’. Imagine if minimisers are wrong about Covid, if its long-term chronic impact is similar, or worse. We’re infecting…

Re-watched the Nuremberg Trials the other day, with newly discovered audio of the hearings. Echoes of present times, with populists (Trump, Robodebt pollies) in the dock for egregious trashing of national leadership. It made me think about…

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…

Using David’s picture to illustrate a point. This gobsmacking beauty might inspire travellers to go to Broome and ‘experience it for themselves’. Many already do. I want to challenge that seeming a good thing to do, because doing that is…

What was the reason the federal and State health departments weren't chosen to do this job? They surely have this expertise, it's one of their core reasons for existing. I think this is a vital question for Australia. There may be a simple…

These are the 4 stages the Doherty Institute were asked to model when we opened up in late-2021. Two important things to note here I think (we need to revisit that stage of the pandemic, as the promised Royal Commission that will probably…

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…

A total absence of talk of infection. Pandemics have always been defined by the number of INFECTIONS. Not by how sick people get, or by how immune they are. Endemicity the same. The economic ‘live with the virus’ reframing, lethally…

Fantastic as always from @AlanKohler. Again I think we need to add why the modelling and strategy for the pandemic was also outsourced to the private sector. A Royal Commission for the lot. https://t.co/fc2J9a0TOL

You see how popularity-based democracy works? This has only become a live issue because parties now think there’s votes in it. That should be irrelevant. We don’t vote for who plays for the Matildas, or tomorrow’s weather.…

From the Australian government’s information sites. We need to continue to fight the spin that replaces our focus on infections, with hospitalisations, severe illness and death. There’s wisdom and bitter experience in defining epidemics…

The economy thinks the Covid pandemic’s greatest tragedy was not having people crammed into rooms together at the office. I’ve witnessed these celebrations firsthand, like we’re all supposed to be grateful to be back in the battery hen…

If you want to understand how societies were hijacked by economies, you need to understand the total fiction at the middle of every economy. ‘Supply and demand’. Once you get that, everything from traffic to housing to Covid will make…

Spinoza’s lost message to us is that the true and right thing to do will always be unpopular. It will be unpopular to ALL. It’s the surest KPI for truth. If you think you’ve found the truth to a particular complex problem, and that truth…

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…

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

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

I asked all of my friends how many times they’ve had Covid. Almost all of them only once, a handful twice. It made me think, just as there are relatively small numbers of superspreaders who do most of the spreading, are reinfections also…

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

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

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 thing about propaganda and slogans is that the language is content-free. Take “we’ve got to learn to live with Covid-19 and return to normal”. Ask anybody who says that what it actually means. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s actually…

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…

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

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

If I thought Covid was over, I don’t think I’d spend my apparently vital new freedom coming here every day to tell everybody that Covid is over. ‘Covid is over’ is just one more team in the team sports. The most cult-like of all the teams.

The genius of propaganda is getting people to think that ‘living with’ Covid means catching it. Living with sharks doesn’t mean getting bitten by sharks.

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…

I think it’s fine to say we’re all ‘living with’ the harsh Australian sun. It meant world record amounts of melanoma with ‘healthy tans’. But we learned to live with it in a smarter way. We can do the same for air and infection, we’re very…

The continuing farce of a Labor government adopting a one-page public health strategy from a free market think tank. We need an 'Anthony' - GBD' shirt. https://t.co/DSDsEwqCDr

We saw this ignoring of expertise for 30 years, with climate change. And then we were surprised when the same playbook was used for Covid. https://t.co/nln3zwhHRp

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…

It's a cascading thing I think. Politicians responding to gotcha journalism, pressuring VCs to do something about campus consent culture. Which becomes a VC KPI. Which in turn becomes brutalising compliance behaviour by staff.

RN, the Snowy 2.0 stuck tunnelling machine. A political brain fart project which hapless engineers now need to try to make work. Listen to the gotcha attack, like an opposition leader trying to find a 'black hole' in a government budget.…

What nobody says when prices skyrocket because of lack of supply, of anything, is that it’s really just extortion. The owner of the scarce supply could just sell what they have left, at usual prices. Economy piffle words allow them to…

This the shift ‘the economy’ introduced to societies. To strip away their collective focus, and re-home it in millions of disparate ‘jobs’. Making the public (collective) employees (individual). Employers or ‘business’ then run the entire…

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…

There's a great lesson here in how dog-whistle politics works. Not every person who votes No will be like this, obviously. But every person like this will likely vote No. And that's the critical thing, and why dog-whistle politics was…

There are two big demand dips for electricity in NSW every day right now, one about 3.30-4am, and the other around 1pm. Supply is always greatest of a day time, because of big solar and wind input. But why is the lowest demand point also…

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

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

Talk about ‘balancing’ water use in the Murray-Darling basin between economic, social and environmental uses is the same bullshit balance of economy vs climate change, and economy vs Covid. Weasel words. These aren’t separate domains to…

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…

As a thought experiment, imagine all social media turned off for a week. Or even two weeks. Seriously, imagine the shift you might see in societies. How it would pan out. It’s not a quick thought experiment, these platforms have insinuated…

Bad people understand group psychology. Good people think righteousness is a substitute. https://t.co/DZxpfkzv7K

I feel the whole living with the virus fantasy hangs by one thread only. The (relative) efficacy of current vaccines against severe disease. If that were to fail what do people think might happen?

Great thread from Noor. https://t.co/NfxYUgJTfc

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

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

You'll never understand housing (or anything) as a market. It's gambling. Bidding up prices, hope of quick capital gains etc. The sorts of measures that address problem gambling may also help with housing. @ProfSteveKeen thoughts?…

What is the current data/thinking saying about longevity of vaccine efficacy against severe disease? If that does fall off a cliff too, does it mean those with vaccine-only immunity are at increasing risk of severe disease? @ejustin46?…

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

It's still my experience that nothing is more expressive of the unthinking, invisible arrogance and entitlement of Western culture than its assumption of the right to travel as often and as far as it likes.

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

I don't need 25 questions. Just one. Who cares what radio hosts think about anything? https://t.co/sHKwKMLsZz

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

I'm not worried about AI too much, intelligence is in desperately short supply. A study from Warwick, MIT and Harvard in conjunction with the BCG found this. (Source: Ethan Mollick) https://t.co/K8mVez2URL

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…

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

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

The ‘housing crisis’ is really just dispossession of land. The type inflicted upon indigenous peoples, and now shifting into the broader population. Under cover, as always, of a fictitious ‘economy’, a ‘market’. Weasel words to hide what’s…

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

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

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

Hospitalisations. I think many of us in the community aren’t really focused on that, but more on just how sick so many of the people we know are, and who aren’t getting better. Mostly at home, or even turning up to work, sick.…

Covid minimisers on here continuously telling us about our wonderful and ever-growing immunity. It must be happening somewhere else. I think a lot of the minimisers work from home. https://t.co/rpmRFiuATE

Here’s travel in a nutshell. Trash, and move on. Know how to fix this? Stop thinking of place as an experience to be consumed. Stop being promiscuous, with place. We don’t do this with human relationships, so why do we with locations?…

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…

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

Those convinced we can infect our way out of a pandemic don’t think we can inflate our way out of inflation.

Popularity-based democracy thinks a shift to independents and third parties is progress. It’s just brand differentiation. A proliferation of popular choice, like chip flavours. It’s still all chips. All churning of fads and fashions…

A true revolution in thinking would be to unpack the ‘job’ as the centre of social life. Because it’s a social creation, vesting ultimate authority in society to an employment relationship. How many people have jobs is a banal, secondary…

When you strip away any social, community basis for relationship between strangers, who live and work inside job markets, it can seem a solution to the ‘loneliness’ this creates to re-form adolescent style friendship groups, for adults. I…

One of my favourite Tory UK slogans is ‘levelling up’. They mean ‘we’ll reduce inequality by making everybody else as rich as us.’ Like saying ‘you can all climb Everest now, we’re going to fill the space around it with 6000m of gravel.’…

Sunak’s Tories are jettisoning much of their climate change action, in favour of ‘practical’ net zero. There’s one of those weasel words, like ‘balance’. Means do nothing. In ‘balancing’ Covid action against the economy, can anybody…

NSW had an eat out to help out scheme. I don’t think I saw a single journalistic critique of the stupidity of it. It was more sinister than just a fillip for the economy too. It was gaslighting, to normalise mass infection.…

The Viagra-rush of votes populism provides always has an (ignored) final act. Where the crowd turns on the populist leader, who they see as betraying them when the gap between populist fantasy and reality gets too great. /1 The mechanism…

Always think socially. Culturally. The idea of a generation implies humans shaped by an entire lifespan and the events that occur during that 50-100 years in time. But for some time now, Western humans are shaped almost exclusively by just…

Tedious, but I screenshot the actual headline and then include the link in the message body or alt text. https://t.co/TprLJODc38

Politics today is done with language. With slogans. Can we get rid of the highly-emotive, deliberate propaganda of calling basic sheltering and quarantine 'lockdowns'? That word was designed to make people feel avoiding infection as being…

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…

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…

People think I’m mad when I say we need to get rid of politicians and let the public service run countries again. Politicians are already well underway in doing the opposite. And that’s a very, very bad thing. https://t.co/cBbv6KWirT

Wanted to re-post this thread, about how politics works. It’s the tiniest, mostly irrelevant popularity contest on top of a reality that always just continues on, without it. Voters use a gut feel of trust rather than detailed analysis. As…

I love that reality carries on mostly oblivious to what social media thinks, about anything. For example energy companies rushing to solar and wind and storage, because it’s hugely profitable for them. While morons sit here every day…

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

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…

The only reality modern governments will acknowledge, whether Left or Right, is 'the economy'. Which isn't even a thing, it's a slogan uttered to defend the status quo i.e. doing nothing. https://t.co/KOinr08aHr

They don't have a clue what to do, because nobody does. It's like reading tea leaves. People who defend 'the economy' can't explain one thing about how it works, when it stops working. There is no 'it'. It's a handful of indicators…

I’m not here for pile-ons, I’m interested in beliefs and ideas. I still as an amateur epidemiologist am led to believe by everything I read that a pandemic is defined by number of infections. Not by how damaging those infections may or may…

So if it is once every 5 years on average, it's an interesting contrast with once per year on average being described as a good outcome, for Covid. I think it's fair to say Covid is an even more dangerous disease, as well.…

Haven’t paid a cent for electricity in over a year. (We’re making money.) The energy part of the ‘cost of living crisis’ doesn’t exist for us. We need to re-frame our social problems, to stop feeling like isolated individuals. It’s a con.…

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.’

It can be lonely being Gen X, the smallest generation to boot. Wedged between an older generation who think life is an episode of The Love Boat, and younger generations off with the social media fairies. h/t @NobodyImpawtant…

From https://t.co/IzVl6mbs0u Politicians think daily focusing on Covid numbers is damaging. I think them focusing on polling and popularity is far more dangerous. Can we suppress that instead? https://t.co/0EGZ5blgVS

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.…

I don’t think anybody begrudges any musician playing until any age. The issue is more them occupying a cultural space created for adolescents, when they’re 80 years old. https://t.co/RKrUOy9uHM

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

Yesterday's 'Biden Time' on Radio Sydney was cut to under 5 minutes while we listened to the B52's Rock Lobster, with Fran Kelly describing the studio dancing. I think ABC radio is going dumb in search of listeners. https://t.co/jtl1RYZptC

Listened to an excellent discussion about clean air chaired by @dom_ma and including @c_s_wallace. A key topic for discussion was how to de-individualise public health again, to get scale and traction on topics like clean air. I think the…

You’ll feel less powerless if you stop thinking society is millions of independent people. 5% of people determine what happens, the other 95% imitate them. Anything can ‘go viral’ and be part of that 5%.

It's nice NSW Health acknowledges we're still in a pandemic, and not 'post-Covid', as many others say. Pretty telling that our only indicators of infection now are who turns up half-dead at ED, and sewage treatment plants.…

Another day watching on as we cheer on this or that political team, thinking that changes anything. Like Sportsbet taking odds on the apple falling on Newton’s head. (It fell anyway.) ‘The world’ isn’t this daily farce, it’s the practical,…

Like Covid, this is mostly a WHS issue. A ban will fix the problem, but what's not being said is that it represents a widespread failure of basic WHS, on worksites. That would put employers on the hook, and economy politics won't do that.…

The genius of the Tupperware party was that it bypassed peoples' natural resistance to being sold things, by getting their friends to sell it to them instead. Social media is this model extended to every part of society, including…

I think the messaging needs to shift away from the idea that population-level measures are required. Much more saleable to target key spreading sites, like schools and other workplaces. Places that are already required to be acting by law.…

Lewis Thomas had a wonderful mind. If we’d combined these insights with a focus on public health basics like clean water and air over the past 100 years, I think we’d have an entirely different health system right now, and far healthier…

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…

I keep this, from December 2022, as a KPI for the hybrid immunity strategy. For context, I’ve circled in red the Delta wave in Australia. https://t.co/Q0bo1MzDBW

It’s unpopular to criticise social media. (Imagine that, popularity platforms taking offence at unpopular things.) The platforms build out a model of society that strips away all social hierarchy and existing connection, and replaces it…

I think a lot of loyal ALP voters already abandoned them over their complete capitulation on Covid. But those still wavering will rush for the exits if nothing is done about Stage 3 tax cuts. #auspol https://t.co/jVjlSO00p9

The usual inanities about AI on #QandA, that we need humans to do all the creative, innovative things, and leave AI to do the donkey work. Nearly all humans aren’t creative, entirely habitual and imitative in everything they think and feel.

We're still following the 'strategy' from a free-market think tank, instead of 150 years of public health precedent. Still waiting to hear the last pandemic we used hybrid immunity against. Still can't find it in any textbooks or…

I periodically re-post the GBD, so somebody can explain how it's different to our national Covid strategy. (I find them to be identical.) And also to explain why a left-leaning government is using a free market think tank's one-pager,…

You have to love the battle. To inject humour and intelligence into it. To reject the false promises of diversionary ‘fun’ culture, that try to keep you a teenager your whole life. Travel, recreation, good ‘markets’ for the economy.…

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…

This increasing (uninvited) freelancing by failed politicians on the world stage is often at the behest of think tanks they're part of, showing where their real loyalties were even when they were in power. Privatisation of governance.…

The US EPA has an excellent short debunking of the most common anti-EV myths. Link in alt text. https://t.co/zLeP5lRzlB

I thought we were protecting the vulnerable for the past 2 years. Combination of privatised aged care and the impossibility of turning any segment of the population into a permanent bio-hazard containment facility. https://t.co/DyY9CyEr51

‘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…

You can now get a reading of national weather by looking at the wholesale spot price for electricity (the purple line). Yesterday’s widespread storms drove that price up, as sunshine plummeted. Not an argument against renewables, an…

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…

I think we should be concerned that our new renewables-based grid will be so heavily privatised from the beginning. Privatised energy has been mostly a failure. The only exception may be focusing more on rooftop solar, which would also be…

I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations and realised my rooftop solar was generating about enough electricity every week to get an EV from Sydney to Perth. I wanted to use that fact to open a window onto a set of beliefs that is…

For a moment when I saw the headline I thought the experts were going to explain how we stop Covid. Alas, it’s firmly in the ‘have a Bex and a good lie down’ category. Like road safety experts saying ‘after your accident, make sure you…

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…

I think we need to get National Cabinet, the AHPPC and ATAGI on a cruise together. Lead the hybrid immunity push from the top. https://t.co/EG7xuaeNjF

My constant thought too, that we have no way of predicting long-term health impacts. No way anybody thought H.pylori would cause stomach ulcers, or EBV would cause MS. It's criminal that we're not using risk management to approach this,…

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…

We don't let inflation rip, we don't live with it. But we can infect every child in the land with a novel virus. Repeatedly. An entire generation, the future. A tool of our creation, the economy, does this. And we worry about AI. Bring on…

The fastest way to short-circuit human intelligence is any sort of travel. https://t.co/Gwxr9Df2X6

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

A vital thread for those who want to understand the deep cultural war that’s been in play for decades now. You won’t understand that war with our traditional political categories. https://t.co/ByAOIzuqgB

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…

Striking to watch contrasts between different political cultures. People from the US for example much more likely to believe change will come from mobilising lots of ordinary people. Australians focus more on accountability for their…

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…

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

Society is social groups. The anti-lockdown group is also often the anti-EV, anti-renewables group. One of the ways to really wind them up is to debunk the idea of the ‘grunt’ of ICEs. In reality combustion engines are puny, and always…

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

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…

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

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

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…

Once you see that all human life is social, and that the root of that social life is imitation, you can't unsee it. But the reason all social life (and thus pretty much all of life) is about people copying other people is…

Work colleague on their third Covid infection, very sick. And confused, after two 'mild' earlier infections. Probably thought they were getting some hybrid immunity. I might try and sell them a used car.

The engineering Tesla is doing is extraordinary. A longer video here from Jay Leno investigating the Tesla semi. Worth watching to hear all of the thought and features that have gone into this thing, it could revolutionise heavy transport.…

The UK’s Tories are even worse than our National Cabinet. But their institutions are stronger, all the senior players now being grilled in the dock over the Covid debacle there. Here minimising loons think the pathetic non-inquiry we’re…

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.…

In terms of death and suffering, deliberately entrenching a new ‘endemic’ disease is a worse crime against humanity than any war or genocide. Because it will keep killing for generations. Our lifestyle culture thinks only of the present…

EBV alone should have alerted us to the potential dangers of chronic infection. Infecting up to 95% of the global adult population, asymptomatically. We’re ‘living with’ it. And it’s becoming clearer all the time what a terrible housemate…

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…

Like all the let it rippers, plenty of weasel words about difficult balancing acts. There was no balancing act, from Day 1 they looked for any way to undermine public health action, which they saw as a threat to the economy. Ditto here in…

The Covid pandemic. Where 'proportionality' means ignoring everything like this, and doing any sort of risk management is described as hysteria. What's proportional about that? Nothing, it's propaganda, debasing the language.…

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…

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

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…

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

The ALP is trying to be successful by disproving all of the slogans the LNP have made up about them over the years. Strategic suicide. 'Don't think of a purple monkey' makes you think of a purple monkey. Everything they do to prove the…

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…

I've now had at least one of every single Covid vaccine available in Oz. 2 AZs, 2 Modernas, a Novavax and a Pfizer. It'd be nice if heterologous protection is an actual thing, anyone know where that thinking is up to?

It’s never been clear how this ends. Russia is still a superpower, no matter how much NATO arms Ukraine it doesn’t stop it being a war against a superpower. Did we think Western technological superiority would somehow mean a tiny nation…

Fascinating carbon offsetting scheme in the UK, where polluting firms pay to retrofit social housing for energy efficiency, solar, battery and heat pumps. Link in alt text. https://t.co/e5Jmleap1D

I think we need to know how many SARS-Cov-2 infections our expert advisers have had. Those attached to government, and those running separate advocacy. To know if they’re walking the talk, or their ‘hybrid immunity’ is just us all getting…

I think the Python boys could all lead us in rounds of their 'I Like Chinese'. Our idols in the UK and US are leading us down the path of empty culture wars, handing domination of the next 2 centuries to Asia. Domination they'll richly…

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…

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

The speed of change with renewables is breathtaking. Almost a dramatic story every single day. This one is huge. The savings to households and businesses will be significant, and much more. Link in alt text. https://t.co/zF1EWcWTYn

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…

I have huge respect for the law, it’s the last institution standing against the populist tidal waves of dumb destruction. Not because laws are rules, the libertarian obsession. But because law is a way of thinking. A story about Judge Judy…

Air travel is another perfect example of widespread regulatory capture by fossil fuel-based industries. Look at airports. Massive, ongoing expansion, despite the known challenges of climate change. But to really see the capture, have a…

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…

The successes against HIV were about incredible anti-virals, AND preventing spread of the infection. Humans have been doing this with infectious disease for a long time. The Covid debacle of vax and relax is entirely a political attack on…

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…

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…

Read this piece if you want to see just how deeply infectious pathogens may be invading us, and how almost impossibly complex it can be to identify and treat them. Chronic infection is, I’m absolutely sure, the greatest untold story of all…

This to me is how our lives increasingly look. Lives focused on recreation, on ‘having a good time’. Trips, concerts, restaurant meals, sights etc. Like an eternal episode of The Love Boat. Lives of bullshit jobs, made tolerable by the…

Important thread from the WHO, which ends with questions. I’d add this one: when will we remove the management of infectious disease from all possibility of interference by elected politicians? We already don’t let them manage bushfires, a…

All of the terribly complex things politicians say they need to ‘balance’ in their thinking when addressing a pandemic or climate change are all really just a handful of donors.

I think this sort of thing still assumes people are a type of information processor. In reality people are social, they take their cues from what others are doing, not from information. It ignores status, which is what determines what…

Read this story. The same fundamental truths of human behaviour repeat at every scale. 95% of people will follow the lead of about 5% of people in the group. It's not about information. It's about status. https://t.co/2t16GNjo4D

A belief central to our culture is that we need to ‘experience’ places. It’s an empty concept, never unpacked. As if simply being somewhere allows you absorb some culture, osmotically. Or some sight. The idea of ‘being there’. Climate…

Can't read most of this because of a paywall. But it seems very much at odds with the analysis I shared earlier from Cutler and Summers (https://t.co/CchnCGAt8b). Though their analysis is more economic in focus. https://t.co/RiXhAmgdIB

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,…

What can netball teach us about pandemics? If you follow it, as I do (my favourite sport), you'll have noticed that the rest of the world is getting closer to Australia. Why that's happening I think is a powerful lesson about pandemics…

We know Covid is tremendously dangerous and damaging. We knew climate change was the same, for 30+ years. It didn’t stop climate change. Knowledge and information are not what drive societies.

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…

I feel that if Orwell were alive today, he’d give up writing. Reality is way more perverse than even his imagination could have coped with. https://t.co/8rnKT0dqKd

The day we understand the bizarre idea of being a tourist in our own land is the day we may start to understand how little we’ve changed, culturally, since the days of Empire. Why this matters for climate and Covid, and everything else. /1…

I think this is a good thing, new representatives from parties that aren’t completely captured by vested interests. But we’re deluding ourselves if we think we can vote our way out of the problems voting causes. Populism IS voting.…

It’s illegal in NSW to go into a public place knowingly with Covid, and not take reasonable precautions against spreading it. Those who advise the public that reasonable precautions are a waste of time are actually inciting a crime. Itself…

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…

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,…

I have several friends who are GPs, whose attitude towards Covid I’d describe as professionally negligent. Because I believe nearly all human behaviour is social behaviour, it seemed worthwhile to talk about why they may be like this. The…

The great untold story of the fabled range of ICE vehicles. Getting the fuel to the servos. It’s like the famous story about Gandhi, that it cost his family a fortune to keep him in poverty. Here are some facts, for the Australian context.…

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…

Can we run a book on how long it takes for our prominent local minimisers to appear to reassure everybody that there’s nothing to see here? https://t.co/r565KsmZkx

A question for the calm voices of minimisation. My mother’s 80th birthday, next week. Her lungs aren’t great, a variety of ailments there, but not enough to prevent her living a good life, albeit at a slower pace. She wants to celebrate it…

Just as we don’t allow some people to speed on roads just because they like driving fast, we shouldn’t even need to discuss why it’s ok for some to spread infection freely, while others are trying to avoid it. ‘Most’- most people never get…

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…

Most public debates would be transformed by shifting the focus away from the information being exchanged, and towards the question of who we trust. And why. In reality most of us don’t know much about anything, except those things that are…

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…

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

I guess the guy who was dismantling his own legal system not long ago is hardly likely to care what some other judiciary thinks about anything. All these ultra-conservatives have legal systems in their sights, the last checks and balances…

Populism needs to be understood to be beaten. It brings to the surface the true mechanisms of human belief and knowledge. A mechanism of trust, not of understanding. We trust others, in all areas of life, to know things. And they trust us…

Kids with bags of camphor around their necks, during the Spanish Flu pandemic. It was thought by mothers that it may ward off infection. We can laugh now. But we’re doing absolutely nothing to protect kids from Covid.…

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

The Project, interviewing the head of Jim’s Mowing, a prominent lockdown critic. Interview begins with the host saying the pandemic ended a year ago, and nobody wants to think about it any more.

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.…

What does Rousseau have to offer us on Covid and climate change? Something pretty mind-blowing, actually. He said that a society has all of its rules at once. What does that mean? Some amazing and unexpected things, about how societies…

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

I read every word Shaw wrote, growing up. To this I would say most of what we attribute to the use of the human mind is really imitative social behaviour. Minds are not changed, different beliefs achieve greater or lesser success,…

I thought we were all supposed to be getting Covid multiple times? Except now that means our immune system might be damaged? Knock me over with a feather. https://t.co/tulpeP5twp https://t.co/7xxau0NeoN

All of society is connected. Those who advocated for 'living with' Covid were really looking to destroy what remains of public institutions. It was political. They succeeded, and the damage is still spreading. https://t.co/XfUBzdFNTy

I love the ‘hysteria’ thing from minimisers. Who are the only hysterics in the conversation, literally terrified of doing simple things like controlling the spread of infections. While those arguing for control are like people asking for…

Female friend, pregnant (8 months). Said to me yesterday, ‘so you’re still wearing a mask?’ I was curious about her source of Covid info. Turns out it’s mostly Gerard Rennick. Also thinks Trump has a lot to offer. Highly educated. Social…

The Nats found a way to marry their affair with fossil fuel and mining dollars to their traditional base. Renewables. Don’t be fooled into thinking this is some ‘grassroots’ movement. The Nats are out there scaring the horses every day,…

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…

“However, I think we really need to rethink our strategy of just relying on everyone to catch Covid repeatedly as our only strategy.” Yep, it’s not a strategy. It’s having no strategy, dressed up as a strategy. https://t.co/FS254tyMvs

I spent a bit of time over the weekend reading research literature on hybrid immunity. Specifically for Covid, but also any other reference to it. A very contentious topic, and reading the literature you could come away being convinced…

A thought experiment. If Covid mutated to a high-mortality variant across age groups, that the current vaccines couldn’t help with, what do we think governments would do?

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…

@arijitchakrav shared this paper with me, it’s a ripper. Looking at the high-wire act of hybrid immunity, modelling how that thin line could collapse in a ‘gray swan’ antigenic drift or shift. I was struck also by the way spread is the…

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…

In a personal responsibility pandemic, casually allowing yourself to get infected and spread it to others is the same as pissing in a public pool. You can't fence the piss off to only one section of the pool. Your infection is everybody's…

This is how seductive seeing society as an economy is. I don’t actually think more competition is the answer to grocery prices. That’s part of the mythology of market economies, that they operate via competition, adopted by all sides as an…

4 Corners excited some last night because it went into bat for their team. The ‘big corporate market power price gouging’ team. Except none of it made sense. Nobody asks how you get power in a market, which is supposed to be a mechanism to…

Reading true expertise leaves you feeling satisfied that you’re learning something, in this case about the gaping holes in the idea of hybrid immunity. Thanks to @DavidJoffe64 for the reference. https://t.co/aoOC7ImmLT…

It's taken a pandemic to show that peoples' beliefs and actions are shaped by their peers. Not by institutions or expertise. Humans are social creatures, they imitate others as a guide to how to think and live. Why social media is so…

Here’s the team sports in plain view. They got their scalp, victory! A program I thought almost completely lacking in any insight into the actual problem, apart from repeated droning about ‘price gouging’, itself another team sports…

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

The old (understandably) checking out of the shit-show. Leaving workforces not only short of staff, but also knowledge and experience. https://t.co/wRflqOIxUi

Brilliant thread from Cory. I’ve noticed this about Google search, it’s nothing like what it used to be. All of these platforms begin with vaguely social-looking functionality, and end as a cesspit of targeted ads. https://t.co/XVAaLWcovs

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

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

@Mark_Butler_MP @acmadotgov I'd be very curious what you think about this. https://t.co/yt7Ti1ZfDg

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

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…

Going back in time, one of the main debating points Covid minimisers use is that we couldn't have maintained control of Covid without permanently restricting flights. Two things about that. Transport in pandemics can be managed with…

Thoughts/data on these? https://t.co/npKicOX3L7

Such a dramatic contrast with the drivel celebrity Covid minimisers drip feed to the public every day. The pandemic will not go away if we ignore the definition of a pandemic, as the number and spread of INFECTIONS. https://t.co/pi7ck2VojB…

If your office environment had CO2 readings of between high-500s and mid-700s, and you also used an air purifier at your own workstation, would you mask? Curious how people do their risk assessments.

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…

Rooftop solar is the way people should be thinking about Covid. The collective grid-level effort is lagging, but you can create energy independence and make money using your own roof. That will also have powerful impact on the wider…

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

I read this and couldn’t find anything resembling an answer to the question posed in the title. Members of ATAGI. What have I missed? https://t.co/uUOn4DL2MA

Lots of data analyses focusing dutifully on the political framings of this pandemic, around severe disease, hospitalisation and death. I refuse that framing. The data tells a different story, for infections. All charts from:…

A bit funny that somebody thinks we still have an automotive industry. And funny that the LNP closed it down. https://t.co/zgw0fZY7pn

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…

The Plague describes an entire town locked down, to prevent a pandemic spreading to wider society. The anti-lockdown NSW Gov did this with the western suburbs of Sydney in this pandemic. That didn’t disturb them. What disturbed them was…

We need to eliminate Covid. And no that doesn’t have to mean eradicate it. It means stop it spreading in communities. Which is effectively the same thing, for those communities. It is what we’ve always done, for serious infectious disease.…

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…

I’ll listen to stories about hybrid immunity when there’s clear evidence of significant, sustained reduction in cases. Of infections. I read that vaccination that targets mostly severe disease has been followed by reduction in infections…

This was where I first saw the idea that vaccinating against severe disease can still lead to effective disease elimination. The (flawed) idea of ‘sterilising’ immunity is actually the root of vax-and-forget public health. /1…

Everywhere that politics inserts itself you end up with false binaries. Like the one between hybrid immunity and ‘Zero Covid’. In reality hybrid immunity *requires* control of spread as well, to prevent pathogen evolution and immune system…

“In reality, the spectrum of protection might best be framed as the extent to which vaccination prevents transmission of the wild-type virus or bacteria.” Immunity doesn’t end epidemics or pandemics. You have to stop transmission, immunity…

Politics is language. When Trump says he wants Presidents to be immune from prosecution, he means he wants them to be above the law. It won't happen, and it's laughable it even gets airtime. https://t.co/fteofdjlN1

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

I think a still very under-appreciated piece. https://t.co/XhVx8OWyvw https://t.co/Ksu2dafNtQ

Prevalence data from the UK. Infections. This is what we need to see to determine if the pandemic is waning, pandemics = number of infections. This looks promising, though it’s sampling, not widespread testing. But promising. /1…

What Joni Mitchell says about human relationships here also applies to place. Our obsessive travel culture is geographical speed dating. We accumulate sights, thinking this is us ‘experiencing the world’. But by not staying put, we never…

This proliferation of infectious outbreaks from multiple pathogens is often attributed to immune damage from Covid infection. I think it could also be a much more lax public health response to all infectious disease, also a Covid…

More than a passing resemblance between the BYD and Tesla websites? I think both are selling great cars, but the site designs are uncannily similar. https://t.co/ko3ix3LGQ5 https://t.co/yl3HlhsQUa

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…

EXACTLY this. The idea Covid can’t be contained or controlled was just political sloganeering, not public health. We have always been able to control spread of disease in some meaningful way. https://t.co/VMev7rkVRg

“The use of existing childhood vaccines, such as MMR, in combating the surge of COVID-19-related morbidity and mortality, is potentially a low-risk, high-yield measure for all populations until the pandemic curve shows a permanent…

Personally I think pretty much everything the human race has ever done comes second to inventing vaccines. Nothing else made a greater impact on life. And now we can't even find a way to get people to use them. The political fallout of…

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…

I keep coming back to immunity in my thinking around Covid, because we’re continually forced into a dumb binary between immunity and prevention of infection. Social media does that, it turns every issue into a binary, with a team at each…

Every single person whose lifestyle is more important to them than stopping Covid reach people like Paul bears responsibility for these sorts of deaths. Viruses don’t go viral. Numpties spread them. https://t.co/GoV1boR6yc

People so often despair that we're not doing basic things like changing to renewable energy and stopping Covid spreading. But then they forget the most popular radio shows in the country. This is the raw material democracy is dealing with.…

Ban all social media. Watch society recover in quick time, freed of the relentless waves of idiot viral enthusiasm and team sports. These platforms are owned by political libertarian billionaires. What did we think they were for?…

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…

In a city today, everybody unmasked. Thinking about the catastrophic impact on societies if the longer-term impact of SARS2 infection is serious. Societies won’t survive. Anybody who says they know that won’t happen is making it up. Public…

Early discussions about hybrid immunity, for Covid. In https://t.co/pMB7Cl5zQK… The individual focus, so common now. The idea immunity is about protecting individuals, rather than about preventing spread of infection. The assumption that…

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…

Michael Hoerger in a thread noting that Americans are getting Covid on average about once per year. I’ve seen similar numbers for Oz. Even more importantly, no sign of reduction in transmission, which is all that will end the pandemic.…

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

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…

Viral persistence. Both at a population level, through uncontrolled spread, and then in our bodies, through viral reservoirs. Covid is feasting on us. https://t.co/lPerp92gnj

It’s not uncommon to use road safety as a way to triangulate ideas about public health responses. In many ways these aren’t distinct things, so it’s not just trading in analogies. Both involve questions of individuals and populations. But…

I’m guessing 3.0 isn’t a new variant. Sting is one of the most thoughtful and considered rock stars. I’ve not heard one of them, through the entire pandemic, at all concerned about anything Covid except the impact on their capacity to…

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

A tour de force thread on the science of vaccination, superb reading. https://t.co/eriICewzkm

Seeing the great summaries of durability of immunity from different vaccines in the paper from @vipintukur prompts a few questions. 1) Given that for most vaccinations protection is <20 years, why aren’t adults required to get more…

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.…

Mechanical ventilation with heat recovery (MVHR) is the quiet achiever of ventilation. Continuous fresh air from outside without losing thermal comfort inside. Should be in schools and other superspreading sites. Super cheap to run too.…

It’s often said Covid spread can’t be controlled, because people wouldn’t support it. But if prevalence really is only between 0.7-5% in the UK, for example, it suggests 95% or more of people could continue to live as normal, with any…

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…

Many responded to this thread by suggesting we do this for lots of other places too, like hospitals and aged care and public transport. And yes, everywhere should have good ventilation. But the underlying point I was trying to make here…

Infection follows a network dynamic. It doesn't infect everywhere all at once, particularly Covid. It forms hubs, which then create networks, and then more hubs in these networks etc. Within countries schools are the main hubs.…

HVAC systems is what schools need. Not just reverse-cycle air conditioners, that don’t introduce fresh air or remove stale air. Not just windows. The NSW Government’s Covid ventilation audit of schools was a desktop audit that resulted in…

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…

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

The belief that Covid is everybody’s problem to solve, spreading everywhere, is the main reason nothing is being done about it. Covid minimisers use that belief to portray the situation as hopeless, so we just need to live with it. Social…

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

“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…

Yep. And politicians will baulk at that if they think it means everywhere, straight away. Target the infection hubs. https://t.co/VC5MEOyie7

I think it should worry Australians that their retirement income system, worth nearly $4 trillion, is run by the same financial industry that brought us the Great Depression and the GFC. Government can’t bail it out if it falls over, it’s…

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…

But it works. And what do we do about it, apart from complain? Nothing. Good people need to start thinking strategically. https://t.co/8nFMr22Rat

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…

Social media is running a real-time experiment of what democracy looks like when ‘the people’ run it. Which as many South American countries can attest, just leads to marauding gangs running the country. /1 https://t.co/Y0OyGwjdCA The…

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.…

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

ffs, can we stop counting the angels on the heads of pins and just go back to preventing widespread infection and disease? How did this ever become something to argue about?

From: https://t.co/NgmWCuoViR Again, not having a go at Christina, it's about the ideas and public policy. 'Things are better', fewer deaths. From a public policy point of view, the deaths are not better once you add time back to the mix.…

The most fundamental obstacle in the public narratives on Covid is the idea that reducing transmission and vaccinating are two distinct options. They’re the same thing. Vaccines only protect individuals when transmission is controlled (in…

@EricIdle Terry Gilliam once said the spirit of Python was the spirit of The Beatles, carried forward. Thoughts? And continuing a possible comparison, did all the Pythons contribute equally to the writing?

When the clear evidence of our senses and experience tell us something is terribly wrong, with our climate and with our health in the pandemic, and nothing is done? Not only that, but when many affect joy at doing nothing? This is what…

From Bob Hawkins' Substack (link in last Tweet). UK. Are we seeing 'increased immunity from vaccinations and infections'? Do coronaviruses have that sort of cumulative immunity? The specific metric here is obviously severe disease, not…

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

The NSW Government’s FuelCheck app allows you to compare fuel prices by location, and also trends across the State. One of those things politicians who believe in markets create, thinking that giving consumers choice will drive prices…

Apologies for Tweeting twice, some technical issue. I don’t really listen to podcasts. They’re so often highly stylised (and monetised) ways to turn maybe 2 or 3 useful insights, that a few paragraphs of text could distil, into hours of…

Physicists are so often scientific arseholes. There’s a God complex sort of thing going on in physics. It often sees itself as the most fundamental science, and therefore the root of all human knowledge. It isn’t either of those things.…

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…

One of the brilliant reframings in @DrCameronMurray’s book on Australian housing, which I hope I’m understanding correctly, is the mistaken idea that housing is in fact a market to begin with. /1 https://t.co/5kG98SiyWc Because the stock…

Brilliant thread on short-selling, and how to use the tools of networked privilege against it. The only gripe I have with @doctorow’s work is the belief I sense that ‘competition’ i.e. taking down all ‘monopolies’, is some intrinsic good.…

The people have spoken! No they haven’t, it’s an artefact of the survey. Voting does the same. What needs to be done with energy is unconnected to what any person thinks, and what they think can be shifted any time, with persuasive…

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…

'Mature' is a new one for me. Mature immunity. Like a well-aged cheese or wine. The whole point of immunity is to not actually have the infection spread 'across the community', hey. What would I know. https://t.co/b8VztpjkmZ

On of the great myths of ‘the economy’ is that it operates already *without* massive government ‘intervention’. Governments create the entire framework of economic activity, including the existence of companies. /1 https://t.co/GvBKOnIYha…

Helping somebody find this card is a good thing, what’s disturbing is how social media platforms have become the most intimate, granular infrastructure of our social lives. Entire communities are increasingly being run on these platforms.…

Both of the big news stories of the past 3 days implicate social media in crimes against civil society. This one, and the Higgins/Lehrmann/Channels 7&10 court case. Enough is enough, it’s time action was taken. /1…

From a recent Independent SAGE update. A great group, I’m not interested in pile-ons of any kind. But what’s striking here is the timidity, the surrender. If this summary analysis is true, we have Covid on the ropes. NOW would be the time…

The interplay of regular and random contacts in the dynamics of superspreading. Or more simply, the role of mixing with strangers in the spread of Covid. It’s mixing with strangers that prolongs the pandemic. /1 https://t.co/BNwb6mmavs…

Tourism and travel seem like great ideas, until everybody else thinks so too. Nobody has ever squared that circle. https://t.co/DBywxwVLmj

Annabel Crabb’s piece perfectly identifies that this case was about team sports, versus justice. And that judgments are masterpieces of reasoning. This type of reasoning also has a name. Casuistry. Case-based thought. One of our greatest…

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

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…

‘Protect the vulnerable’ with uncontrolled spread of Covid just means them locking themselves down at home. We didn’t end lockdowns. We privatised them. https://t.co/hvLW5LkfBW

People spruiking social media as a solution. To anything. Platforms owned by the same billionaires who take away collective agency. Offering the seductive lure of social connection, and then monetising it. Read @doctorow on…

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…

Concepts like ‘fascism’ are handed out here like lollies. Arendt is good on this, how fascism is really about the destruction of thought. Orwell said the same. Facts replaced by opinions. Populism. Social media. https://t.co/SNob53i10M…

The spread of child-free spaces in a society that already isn’t having any children. What does that say to you? Sometimes just zoom out a little, and meanings become obvious. https://t.co/dQSS0opUFw

I think billionaire platform owners would look on every day absolutely delighted how psychologically, emotionally and politically dependent most people seem to be on these platforms. If social media is the answer, what was the question?

Here’s what in my view is most widely misunderstood about social media, and why it’s so dangerous. And yes, I’m still on it. You can criticise unsafe driving, while still driving. And this is what’s at stake in the governments v platform…

I highly recommend reading Cory on 'enshittification', particularly if you think social media platforms are a force for democracy. https://t.co/dScbQiMCmt https://t.co/TYAz77CObD

In modern corporations, CEOs who launch fantasy crusades don't last very long. Is the clock ticking? Musk owns about 20% of Tesla's shares I think. That's a lot of other shareholders with skin in the game. https://t.co/o4cZTSoXVv.…

I think Musk is part of the social media generation, who think the team sports on SM *is* reality. Why Trump set up his own platform, and Musk bought this one. Reality is coming for them, like all populists. Particularly with billions of…

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…

Just once, on Anzac Day, I’d like our unthinking nation to read what Kipling meant by ‘Lest We Forget’. Now co-opted by the bastards who sent millions to their deaths, for their idiot ideologies. Exactly this. The meaning of the day has…

Politics is language. A modern favourite, ‘balance’. When we nod that we need ‘work-life balance’. Why are life and work separate? Why isn’t our work focused on our life? The belief system of slaves.

Another way to think about our perverse travel culture. The places we travel to ‘see’ are the exact equivalent of movie stars or other celebrities. 1/8 https://t.co/cjLUqNPnqd The places themselves are famous, in the same way. We want to…

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…

Just 57 companies produce 80% of carbon pollution Just 12 people generate most anti-vax propaganda on social media. Only a few thousand unventilated schools generate most Covid. Most of our existential problems are much easier to fix than…

It turns out we couldn’t hash-tag this problem away. As with all things, we got some tremendous team sport out of it, as we rallied behind our hash-tags. But the problem? Still there. /1 https://t.co/EOQy0HG8AM https://t.co/Mkl1jhHlh2…

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…

Target the hubs. Covid’s breeding grounds. Schools already have worse air quality than most other public or private buildings, it’s long overdue even without a pandemic. The action needed to eliminate Covid from wide circulation is much…

With the insurance industry facing collapse, it’s important to extend their concept of ‘pooled risk’, to Covid. Pooled risk means distributing risk. The exact opposite of what we’re doing for Covid. /1 https://t.co/W76Ixzb75c With Covid,…

I think we need to be specific here. NSW *politicians* do this. NSW Health will do whatever their masters demand that they do. https://t.co/1K1V6ysaqL

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…

We don't see the social transformation that social media is. It's not about 'sharing' now, we're well past that. Social media *is* increasingly peoples' social lives. They don't just use it to share details of those lives. /1…

“…the key to HIV prevention is that it has been selective, not universal. It focuses on communities most at risk.” We’ve fallen into a trap with Covid. Universalising something that has very specific, manageable causes. 1/5…

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…

Michael has been required reading this week. https://t.co/hv3hOghgST

Obviously there’s always context. But the data suggests superannuation as a retirement income system isn’t working. And it’s costing the taxpayer a fortune. https://t.co/LbjtIvwNRD

Surely one of the pillars of modern thought is the idea that whole populations will develop immunity to a virus, that generates immune-escape variants? Is there some Nobel Prize equivalent of The Golden Raspberries, for science?

Older people think it’s MSM, because that’s what they grew up with. Nobody young consumes it. Hardly any younger adults do either. https://t.co/n3a4XI2g9l

I suspect the use of language Peter so valuably points to here isn't accidental at all. https://t.co/S28NWdhPLc

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…

We so desperately needed expertise on human social behaviour to beat Covid. Instead we used graphs. An example from this week. Person at work about to go OS on holiday for 2 weeks. Very excited. /1 Then a member of their team came to work,…

Political libertarianism has quite a foothold in Australia. Thanks to @ColinKinner for the tip-off on this one. This set of ideas is toxic to civilisation itself. And also laughably illogical and self-contradictory. These ideas must be…

Superb thread on whooping cough, showing how ‘living with Covid’ is a political weapon designed to undermine the entirety of public health. https://t.co/zQ7RWKBek8

Edmund Burke is often seen as a forefather of modern conservatism. He’d have been appalled at people sailing under that banner today. Some critical points here. /1 Taken from: https://t.co/r0Gf4LC1Ks https://t.co/KVJ1SYiBap The general…

Before social media, there was already significant trade in what are called ‘urban myths’. Factoids that sound amazing, and are repeated widely. That are actually compete bollocks. Social media poured petrol on this fire. It’s now our…

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…

I think progress is never about changing peoples’ minds. Their ‘minds’ are really their social group or team. Progress is them adopting your ideas, and calling them their own. And claiming they were their ideas all along. Society is…

Almost in every case the Infinite Covids are not impacted much by the widespread, continuous infection. (Yet.) They're working from home. They have a partner who looks after the sick kids. They're childless. They're retired and comfortably…

I’ve seen estimates that both in the US and Oz, people are getting Covid on average every 12 months. This factoid is trotted out to counter those who say people are getting infected multiple times per year. Is this the flaw of averages at…

The hubris of minimisers to think that humans have a choice on what to do about Covid. Or climate change for the climate deniers. Like reality cares what we choose. https://t.co/Ee6n21EzUR

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…

It seems a killjoy thing. But I don’t socialise on social media. The ‘morning everyone, nice day’ type of thing. I refuse to allow these platforms to become the venue for my personal life. /1 While we’re all aware of the mis/disinformation…

We now process disaster socially by turning it into a platform for expression of our individual grievances and sensitivities. This is part of the victory of political libertarianism. Itself a victory for kidult culture, transformation of…

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…

Most vaccines are not 'sterilising'. It doesn't matter. You just need to slow spread (including with other highly targeted measures), and exponential decay will do the rest. Social media culture encourages thinking in absolutes.…

I asked a Gen Z the other day what they thought of Trump. ‘He’s friendly with the Chinese and the Russians. So we may get less wars.’

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

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.

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

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.…

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

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.…

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…

Things are expensive in cycling because it was captured by imitative rivalry. Look at any public activity or debate, and watch it become a pissing contest over status, as imitative rivalry sets in. 1/2 https://t.co/L2HQ1CIpU6 Or take air…

Despite the blather about ‘lockdowns’ damaging economies, in reality they were a temporary lifeline to a social model that was in terminal decline. Societies are not economies. They will keep collapsing until we understand that. (Link in…

The ideas behind an ‘economy’ are fundamentally at odds with the social realities I described in this thread. That we act as individual consumers, in markets, optimising collective outcomes. That’s never how people behave. ‘The economy’ is…

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

I think it’s only those who don’t do any essential work for society who can’t see that we’re in the middle of social collapse. Things are falling apart. Everywhere. Pandemics reboot societies, they don’t disrupt them. They destroy the old…

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…

"And, think about wearing a mask in crowded places, such as supermarkets. It’s better looking like a dork than becoming seriously unwell." Mask wearing like everything else is driven by a kidult culture, created by high schools.…

A colleague shared scary medical symptoms. Vascular problems, their doctor is baffled. Sounds very Covid sequelae in flavour. I suggested they ask if it’s Covid-related. No interest. ‘You gotta die of something’. The exact words. People…

I think we should have a humanitarian ceasefire. Our Covid 'strategy' has killed almost as many as have died in Gaza. Some call the latter a genocide. By which they mean deaths by deliberate government action. I'm not seeing the…

I think this is anthropology before it's psychology. It's the scapegoating mechanism Girard studied, used by all human groups as a way to absorb and then dissolve the tension of their imitative rivalry. https://t.co/Rwx9viNpDx

Rethinking sterile. It’s not that we need more exposure to pathogens to build our immunity. We need to be exposing those pathogens to many other microbes, to blunt their virulence. https://t.co/ejJUGGBeTz https://t.co/A4IKBQ35He

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…

A reminder that in NSW if you go into a public place knowing you have Covid, and take no precautions against spreading it, you are liable for a jail term of up to 6 months. Section 52 of the NSW Public Health Act. https://t.co/z3m0ST1ltp

It’s easy to think you’re escaping political binaries just by picking one side of them. For example the solution to the disaster of most privatisation isn’t to nationalise, to make it public. 1/4 As soon as you pick a team in that debate,…

Most of what we call thinking is really imitation. Easily seen in citation networks. Like this one mapping RCTs on dietary fat in the prevention of cardiac disease. The big hubs are the most popular papers. Just like the most popular…

Scroll through a Twitter feed and you can see how ‘flooding the zone with shit’ really works. Most obviously it’s the ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’ you can find there. But you don’t understand it by sticking at the level of…

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

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

The wealth and health of Australians improved immensely under ‘lockdowns’. And yet economic commentators still try to portray public health action as a catastrophe. It’s worth checking the think tank affiliations of all who make these…

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…

We extrapolate the desired collective endpoint (end of pandemic) to individual actions. Which leads a status rush to buy only the best masks, and best air purifiers, and fit-testing etc. We only need to SLOW infections. Maths will do the…

(Spoiler: the AI won in a gallop.) Most AI public narratives are based on Hollywood movies people have seen. Most of what is called human intelligence is already just algorithms. Computers do algorithms orders of magnitude faster and…

"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…

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

It’s struck a few people as odd that in rapidly ageing societies, we’re doing nothing to prevent mass deaths of the old from Covid. You’d think old societies would look after the old. Another beautiful window into the actual culture we…

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’re very focused on individual protection, with PPE. And that’s understandable. I always wear respirators myself. But to end the pandemic, we just need to slow spread, to Rt < 1. Even poor masks, in targeted locations like schools,…

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

Immunity is thought of as our individual immune systems. But there’s a collective immunity too. The one that prevents pathogens arriving at your individual immune system. Pathogens are organisms, living in environments. Modifications to…

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…

‘Setting up a debate’ is ‘flooding the zone with shit’ politics. Designed to drown out expertise, while energising apathetic voters towards causes they previously had no knowledge of or interest in. But they love a fight. Team sports…

Yes, we only need to slow the spread. Plus we need to focus on specific locations, of superspreading potential (schools mostly). https://t.co/OJewDZ1pMb

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

There was a time I thought Dilbert could be insightful. Its creator appears to think Trump is some form of salvation for the US. Maybe Dilbert was just office-level libertarianism the whole time.

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…

The individual experience of heat exhaustion has a sobering message for us as societies. We can stumble on, thinking we’re fine. While critical life support systems are in terminal decline. This applies at the level of whole societies too.…

Climate change is often thought of as a ‘natural world’ problem. It’s much more than that. Our trillions of dollars and tonnes worth of infrastructure is built to tolerances that climate change will often exceed. We can’t afford to…

Michael Mosley’s death was so often framed as him being tragically so close to reaching safety. What I don’t think is recognised with climate change is that the infrastructure we think will shield us from the heat, may not be able to. /1…

We shouldn’t fear artificial intelligence. Humans don’t think, they fight each other in teams. Our machines don’t care about the teams. ChatGPT would make better decisions than any government. Right now. https://t.co/emjzPMI7LL

And once again, artificial intelligence knows how to fix our problems. AI is actual thinking. Humans mostly don’t think. They compete for social status, in teams. I vote for AI. https://t.co/xYCu4wFOFm

In team sports societies, team leaders will steer the team the way it’s supposed to go. It’s the same as fashion, leaders of the team will signal the next hoops to jump through, for conformity. If challenged, this accelerates. There is no…

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…

This whole thread should call into question the idea of hybrid immunity. By infecting (we’re barely vaccinating), we’re just driving pathogen evolution. Immunity is an asymptotic light at the end of a tunnel that is never reached. Basic…

In reality politics, the fact pollies and the public think they’ve put Covid behind them is irrelevant. Like saying you’ve beaten gravity because you jumped off a building, and just haven’t hit the ground yet. You will hit the ground.…

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

This is where the fossil fuel age in many ways began. Saudi Arabia's first successful oil well, Well 7. The "Prosperity Well". In 1938 it struck major oil. In a way 2024 is 1938, when it comes to energy. And Australia should be Saudi…

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.…

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

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

Have to wonder if the social media team at NSW Health were tempted to save time by writing “it’s a shitshow out there”. https://t.co/qteeze9C2J

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…

Bad people are always a minority. They win because they think and act like winners. They don’t plead for change, they act as if they are the change. What this means for Covid, and everything else. https://t.co/L11YhcuYXH

A penny for @TurnbullMalcolm’s thoughts watching the Ted O’Brien train wreck on #Insiders this morning.

Saul Griffith gave governments not just a renewable energy strategy, when he said target households. He gave them a winning political strategy. They’re too stupid to listen, too entrenched with the status quo interests in big generation…

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…

I don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask what the projected timeframe is for the fabled hybrid immunity. https://t.co/GXYNStC6nX

It’s time we started thinking of living things as machines. Machines are what Western cultures see as their vast superiority over all previous or co-existing cultures. How many of our glorious machines rival the complexity of any of these…

My mum, the 80-year-old who got her first Covid infection courtesy of a NSW Health hospital, shared a story today. She went to have coffee with friends. 1/3 The friends have all recently been sick multiple times, all of similar age. Some…

It's quite legitimate to consider societies as engineering problems. More so in fact than as economic problems. How pilot-induced oscillations in flight have lessons for a pandemic. h/t to @YouAreLobbyLud for a conversation that made me…

No human debate determines outcomes in life. Winning debates is irrelevant. Reality ALWAYS determines outcomes. Follow reality, and wait calmly for it to take out those who don’t. Who cares what others think? It’s irrelevant to how it all…

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.…

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…

I think the title could be more ambitious. How clean air in schools can end regular Covid everywhere. https://t.co/e1epfEWUSz

The Supreme Court being used as a battering ram in the US, through expertise-based institutional processes. Church v State never ended. What they may not have thought through is unfettered royal power (Trump) vs the Church. He’s very Henry…

Weekly updates on spread. Just imagine. https://t.co/QI1iZyB4Jn

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…

Australia’s energy is a disaster. A perfect example of how popularity-electoral governance is completely incapable of fixing our material problems. Watch all sides rush to household electrification and storage as the only feasible interim…

Read if you want to feel the truth, that only catastrophe will shift humans away from their status quo. The world should be on a war footing. The threat is FAR greater than anything we've gone to war for, before. Instead we'll wait for…

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

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

The word ‘fascism’ is bandied about freely here. Like fairy tales for grown-up. Nobody implements fascism. Fascism is a product, not a mechanism. It’s the endgame of populism. The stripping away of all hierarchies of authority, in favour…

Bah we screw young people. Overheard a distraught young woman who'd been making voluntary repayments to HECS-HELP during the year, thinking that meant she wouldn't have a bill at tax time. Doesn't work like that. Still got the bill, for…

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…

Or in other words, this remains an epidemic disease, with no prospect of endemicity, unless by that we mean endemic epidemic infection. https://t.co/pp0D9PmT6X

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

Dr Seuss couldn’t match the labyrinthine stupidity of what’s happened with Covid. Read and enjoy, in an end-of-times sort of way. https://t.co/ged7RsQ32I

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

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…

If you think social media is vital to beating a pandemic, ask yourself why nations are doing nothing in the first place, to fight the pandemic. SM crippled public health. Just as it did climate action. It's now monetising the 'resistance'…

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.…

This article is almost a decade old. But it asks a question even more pertinent for today. Are we too connected? Connection is an assumed good. I think that's a terrible mistake. /1 https://t.co/fxdtN9iTD5 https://t.co/vWdxNUCSTl Contrast…

“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…

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

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

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…

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…

The US is one of the most violent countries on Earth. Because it rejects basic collective regulation of its society. Without that, violence is the default. But there’s also more to see here. Why so many mass and other prominent shootings?…

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.…

Does nobody cook any more? Ordinary home cooking, not Master Chef performative rubbish for SM? Does nobody make a sandwich for lunch? Was thinking about this in a lunch break this week. Once a week at work I buy my lunch. /1 A small treat.…

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…

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

I think of this being the Health Minister, every time it dawns on me that we’re ready for another day of infecting the entire nation repeatedly, with the 3rd leading cause of death. https://t.co/JSAgxqkzFV

Another colleague returned to work this week, after having several weeks off interspersed with weeks at work (has no sick leave). English is not their first language. I asked her today how she’s feeling. “I’m totally fucked up.”

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

‘LongCovid’. It doesn’t capture well the seriousness of what it is, maybe? It frames it as ‘most Covid is short but some people have it a bit longer’. Politics is language. We need a term that instead frames it as ‘this thing leads to…

Imagine a political party whose entire focus was fixing known problems. No routing them through ideological frameworks. Just ‘this needs to be fixed, we’ll implement best practice known ways to fix it’. With not one cent to anything else,…

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…

I hear this everywhere. Which is a disaster, Tesla do brilliant tech. I wonder again what the Tesla Board is thinking. https://t.co/ZQq7ITC6F8? https://t.co/CYYd7TKgnB

The phone is the gateway between social media and reality. The tool that uploads everyday life into social media, and then allows social media into those lives to transform them. This isn’t a one-way or even two-way process. It’s a…

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

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…

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…

Those long horizontal periods are the social status quo. Only ever disrupted by catastrophic change of some kind, the ‘puncturing’ of the equilibria. I think this is how all societies work. Gradualism is just team sports.…

Our problem is politicians come to power with well-thumbed copies of Ayn Rand, or Marx. A basic principles of engineering textbook is all they need. https://t.co/oWJ32emqtD https://t.co/DxlNURa65e

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

It’s that busy world of perpetual adolescence, what we call ‘the economy’ now, that is cheerfully sacrificing children and the old to Covid. Worth pondering in conjunction with this quote, I think. https://t.co/R8vRKdTAQ8

I think a much longer-term framing that helps to understand the importance of proper building ventilation. https://t.co/CIy2Zxyedm

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…

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

Asymptomatic or 'mild' SARS2 infection may be reflecting immune suppression, rather than immunity. I don't think it's widely understood by the public that the symptoms for infectious disease are mostly generated by your own immune system,…

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.…

I don't think it was Steve I was on the phone with yesterday. My stepfather and sister also contracted Covid during the same hospital visit. It was a smorgasboard of Covid. https://t.co/yVzZs4lqOp

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…

The 'don't panic' first messaging for epidemics and pandemics is now our entire public health strategy. If this does spread widely, it'll be interesting to see how anti-vaxxers go. Difficult to pretend you have 'natural immunity' when…

I think people are too vaccine fatigued to have more vaccines now for mpox. It's been an exhausting 2-3 years of getting none at all, for many.

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…

Increasing talk of the dangers of social media, and possible solutions. None of them will work because the root problem isn’t diagnosed. Sociality is violence. The act of connecting people will always create violence, not harmony. /1…

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,…

Heh, didn’t even know. Think what change would come to the world if social media were shut down. People selling ideas would have to persuade their peers and authorities before getting any oxygen. Right now they get instant global reach.…

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…

Living with the virus is going well. Do we know the longer-term safety of Covid blood donors? I thought there'd been some research on that mentioned here. https://t.co/RvhoIH9KQJ

Re-sharing this because I think it’s fair to say the public health situation went exactly nowhere with the hash-tag. To fix a problem, diagnose it. Covid is a relatively simple problem to fix. Cookers paint it as impossible. It’s how they…

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…

Hub-network structure. A small number of people form hubs, leading thinking and behaviour. Our tendency to think of society as ‘the people’ means we often target public action at everybody, rather than focusing on the hubs. That’s why the…

Bill Shorten sounds fed up on #Insiders. People should read the actuarial analysis of the NDIS. It suggests even the changes Shorten has been able to make (described as draconian) are nowhere near sufficient to make the scheme sustainable.

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

Lockdowns are blamed for the ongoing collapse of our social systems. All lockdowns did was accelerate trends already well underway. Our status quo and those invested in it don't see the collpase underway. They think there are fixes. There…

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…

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…

Evidence that anything can be turned into a team sport. Australians use heat pumps without even thinking about it, they were introduced here before social media took over public life. In the UK it's game on. https://t.co/wIE45iojAG

One of the most extraordinary inversions of all thought is this one, again by Gabriel Tarde, the forgotten genius. How the source of all complexity and also eternity is the infinitesimally small, not the infinitely large.…

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…

A numerically small populist movement led through social media and harnessed by anti-State politicians led to the collapse of public health in Australia. Other politicians could have designed a populist counter-movement, FOR public health.…

The comments on this one are something else. You think you’ve seen the most stupid people in the community every day, on social media. But there are new champions every day. https://t.co/aeDy0L1Qyf

Many express frustration that SARS2 infection seems so arbitrary. For example they have friends taking no precautions who go to major social events, and come home Covid-free. We need to come back to the dispersion characteristics of this…

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

@alvelda noting that the Great Barrington Declaration has become the de facto public health policy of the US and UK. Also now Australia. Powerful read: https://t.co/OtMowzWsoB https://t.co/SbjxKuSV48

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

After the early pandemic, we lapsed into a widespread framing of Covid as a homogeneously spreading pathogen. Nothing hinders beating Covid more than that framing. https://t.co/559hCr3OMG https://t.co/QFkla7JEuC

Read this and you’ll see directly how something like the death in Gaza is just an extension of political team sports, in Israel and internationally. There are multiple teams in play here. The war was always only about their battles for…

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

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

Social media is such a dulling of the brain that people will actively resist the simplifying of a challenge like beating Covid, based on its spread characteristics, because it removes the fuel for their team sports on these platforms.…

I admire them for having a go against the tech giants. They’ll have entire populations addicted to the daily team sports dopamine against them. It won’t work, because the much bigger problem here is thinking about social media platforms as…

Reading a local FB group. Parents congratulating kids in a local team today, “even though 3 of them were really too sick to play”. I know one of those families. The kid has whooping cough. Personal responsibility public health.

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

I think Elon is going to discover that being rich isn’t enough when you piss off entire nation States. The populist public will cheer on Elon in this battle, terrified of losing their SM dopamine fix. Imagine being a Tesla shareholder. Wtf…

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

Social media is just the latest attempt of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to own the world. They don’t even deny it. And we think of SM still as a warm and cuddly ‘connection’ machine. It’s a libertarian assault weapon on democracy.…

Not one insight here. Australia is a settler culture that has no meaningful relationship with its own (or any) land. It travels obsessively to suppress this existential discomfort. To continue the imperial model of accumulation of places.…

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

From 2020, I think we've mistaken means with ends, with Covid. The end was always disease control. Disease control shouldn't be permanent masking, or in some situations even permanent ventilation. /1 https://t.co/EUdkkxFt34…

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…

What is the earliest known reference to the concept of hybrid immunity in the literature, for any pathogen? I thought I'd seen discussed here multiple times that it appears to have been invented during Covid? @AlanBixter do you know?

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

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

I think technically you don't 'contract' shingles, it's a post-viral condition. But the nastiness of the rash shown matches the one from the fellow worker I mentioned here the other day. https://t.co/i48LWyLOWQ https://t.co/jIFF3uiwHF

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…

There's a mythology around 'sterilising' vaccines. That they're like a silver bullet, allowing us to wash our hands (ha) of any other public health work. Measles a good example. https://t.co/wW6alVIlTu 1/4 https://t.co/e3H7frpagr The…

We’re in the middle of the next Industrial Revolution, and our team sports hides it from us. Tim Cook here explaining that it’s the depth of knowledge and skill in China’s industrial revolution that now attracts Western companies, not low…

We're apparently all agreed that the problem with housing is 'lack of supply'. As Lippmann once said, when all think alike, nobody is thinking. The problem with housing is that it's a 'market'. That's it. https://t.co/tipB47L8w3

Sharing other writing on status, so it doesn’t seem just like my deranged thoughts. The house always wins on social media, being liked AND disliked builds status. Disliked even more than being liked. It’s why minimisers taunt us.…

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

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…

Societies have an in-built mechanism to regulate status. And not where we’d normally think to look. Gossip is that mechanism. As powerful an attractant as status itself, because it’s the other side of the status coin. A way to keep status…

I thought, ‘I like that, who wrote that?’ https://t.co/o5GGfNERkW

A magisterial review of current knowledge around the vascular assault of SARS-Cov2. Outstanding, @DavidJoffe64 and colleagues. Brilliant aetiology and a vital summary of current defensive treatments. This horror story should be read by…

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:…

Pandemics are still defined by the number of infections. Not by the level of morbidity or mortality. Wonderful thread from @arijitchakrav here as to why that is. Letting a pathogen spread is an invitation to it to continuously mutate, to…

Turn social media off for all. If you need social media to transact your social life, you’re neck-deep in the enshittification that it creates. If you don’t know what enshittification is, time for some reading. https://t.co/RwLtNwVM7W

Noting that an invading, aggressor military is killing people and doing terrible things is what social media thinks is news. Outrage will fix it! Just as it fixed non-action on Covid, hey. Throw in a few hash-tags.

The perception of living with Covid is probably largely driven by widespread immune evasion. Coronaviruses are famous masters. You’re getting infected, but don’t feel sick because the virus bypasses your initial immune response. Then it…

Re-sharing because I think this is still an opportunity missed. All sides to this debate seem to embrace a totalising framing that prevents action. Social media does that, team sports creates apocalyptic framings. https://t.co/UBGTlYVhyp

Critical knowledge from @Mike_Honey_, as always, thank you. Personal responsibility public health is an oxymoron even with data. But there’s a lot less moron, with the data. https://t.co/qv1FuLIZBI

Just back from a short holiday. The country is awash with travellers, and as vast numbers are now retired or retiring, it’s getting worse. As a culture, a dominant desire at retirement is to ‘see the world’. Even the world at home. It’s a…

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.…

Tesla has about 130,000 workers. None of that matters to many now. They’ll never buy a Tesla, because of Elon. (A mistake, I think.) It’s status that drives us. Always. https://t.co/Bgd6vvHkGL

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

Tipping points are critical concepts for understanding change. Change is usually dramatic, fast, and uncontrollable. @DavidJoffe64 believes certain variants of SARS-Cov-2 will be tipping points for Long Covid, and thus our approach to the…

I think one of the prejudices of thought is the idea that big = complex. The world gets more complex, the smaller you go. Humans can be seen as simplified by-products of microbial action. Similarly any individual in a group is vastly more…

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

We're not going to win arguments aginst fools who think mass infection is public health, and mass pollution is 'reliable, affordable power'. They're not playing the same game. They're flooding the zone with shit. They don't pretend…

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…

Brilliant thread. Acute infection was always just the on-ramp. https://t.co/Ez1ww9TQ8f

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…

A friend currently has Covid. He’s had it multiple times. He says each time the symptoms he found most disturbing were feelings of impending doom, darkness and depression. What’s behind that, do we know @ejustin46, @DavidJoffe64? Probably…

My advice is to never get advice from people who think immunology is a hobby. https://t.co/my57aAGMWJ

I did not know of the existence of virtual colonoscopies until reading some papers today. Obviously you can’t biopsy that way, but apparently highly effective diagnostically. Who has the longer queues right now, colonoscopy or medical…

I think Starlink is genuinely revolutionary. People have understandable problems with Elon’s politics. But what SpaceX and Tesla show is the power of unleashing engineers on global problems. Societies that put engineering at the centre…

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…

Dynamic pricing is what supply and demand is supposed to do. Prices that respond to changes in supply and demand. Because we believe the economy is an actual thing, we think supply and demand produces lower prices. lol.…

Think about the catastrophic risk management of what we've done. The total absence of it. Infecting the entire globe with a novel pathogen. On a whim and a prayer of a 'hybrid immunity' strategy developed by libertarian think tanks.…

These are the threads to come here for. Vast amounts of knowledge condensed into a short format. Thank you @arijitchakrav https://t.co/2urZKth3cJ

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…

I think this is true. But why don’t we ask why politics is about representing anybody? Why can’t it go back to being about simply providing services to a public? Identifying social problems, and solving them, regardless of where they’re…

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

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

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

I have an engineering degree, first class honours. I read this Tweet from top to bottom and the only correct thing I could find was some of the spelling and grammar. https://t.co/XV8KTOECYz

“…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…

BYD employs over 110,000 engineers. Let that sink in. Here’s just how ridiculous our politics are. The world desperately needs enormous numbers of affordable electric vehicles. The Chinese have a glut of them. You’d think that’s problem…

BYD’s hybrid Shark ute has its Australian pricing revealed tomorrow. It should be astonishing value. Motoring writers say ‘it only tows 2.5 tonnes, some of its rivals tow 3.5 tonnes’. No ute should be towing 3.5 tonnes, that’s a death…

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

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

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

Laughable. What destroys trust in government is deliberate activism, by tiny minorities, usually now on platforms like this. This sort of 'inquiry' now mainstreams that activism. /1 https://t.co/ivqBoFbYg3 https://t.co/ESyNtCk9jX Activists…

The stupidity of public life is exhausting. Lockdowns never ended. They were privatised. Instead of government and business restricting spread, now individuals pay out of their own pockets to isolate themselves from public and work life.…

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

This is just for power supply. On my way into work today I thought about climate change and Covid. Both greater emergencies than any war. Why are societies not on a war footing? 'The economy' is why. Really just the status quo, in economic…

Immune dysregulaiton is denied for the same reason airborne spread was. Because it brings the house of minimising cards crashing down. https://t.co/ymr7m58I6s

So many billionaires today think 'democracy' means the absence of government. By definition democracy IS government. Without government there is no system of governance at all. In reality they dislike regulation because it stops them doing…

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

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

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

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

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…

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…

The great strategic advantage of thinking of democracy as ‘the people’, is that we all blame each other when the robber barons do bad things. They love that. https://t.co/M1KXHVrRbr

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…

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

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

I reckon this hashtag will finally be the one that does it. OK, I don’t think that. https://t.co/4qUMMpLEUi

This extract from Will Storr's book on status is required reading if you want to understand Covid minimisers. For 'events', let's use 'anti-lockdown crusades'. /1 https://t.co/1Wc9ZiCQJa "Events like these are often described as moral…

No matter how dark life seems, brilliant intelligence will always be a shining light. Exhibit A. https://t.co/Rot2n5rGxr https://t.co/FoleGSLbSE

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,…

When you read about the almost impossibly complex challenges of treating post-viral syndromes, it really hits home just how fucking stupid ‘living with viruses’ is as a public health strategy. https://t.co/thRmnSBHxr

Only catastrophes shift societies. I think it’s almost certain Trump would have won consecutive terms, if not for Covid. Only a pandemic blunted that momentum. Only pretending the pandemic is over let him back in. https://t.co/fQg99yzOS4

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

I think no amount of draconian legislation would be too much to dump on social media. If it means shutting the platforms down, even better. If privacy is the concern, gimme a break. Monetising our personal and social lives IS the business…

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…

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.…

COP29 was a cop-out. As all the climate conferences are. It’s ridiculous to think the status quo will shift by having conversations. https://t.co/YkYf1Fb3H5

Wow, that's incredibly sad. Gemma was a fighter. Like others I thought she'd come through the worst of it. And so tragic for her family. Bye Gemma. https://t.co/N4QJC1tWu1

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

Podcasting and vlogging/YouTubing etc. seem to encourage a lack of discipline in refining and streamlining thought. Ideas that a paragraph or two of text could capture take 30+ minutes to listen to or watch. Verbose wallowing in public…

@simonahac I thought this was a damning indictment of what happens when you’re a State that drags its feet in the renewables transition. Nearly half of the coal fleet down, and we’re not even in summer yet. Only renewables kept the lights…

Another day in the algorithm. Reading the usual mix of genius insight and team sports battles. All of which goes…nowhere. Except in profits and influence, for platform owners. Our social lives captured, monetised and weaponised. Families…

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.…

As an engineer, I think it’s worth repeating every day: Renewables are the *only* cheap source of energy. There are no other cheap sources of energy.

How is everybody going with ‘the people’ running societies? Our own ideas about democracy are what destroys it. What those with highest status did was use this whole idea of ‘the people’ to absolutely dominate everybody. /1 They know that…

“Researchers say it's time for travellers and governments to rethink long-haul travel.” Good luck with that. It defines the culture, gotta be always moving, always doing. Can’t just be. Children of accumulating empires, now bucket lists of…

Why do bad people keep winning our political games? Because they understand people better. They know what drives all people is status. Have a look around the culture you’re living in. Whether it’s homes, cooking, watches, cars - the…

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

Got a JN.1 jab today. Not a soul in the pharmacy except me and the staff. Back at work a colleague said ‘I thought we were only allowed 3 Covid shots in total?’ Public health lies in ruins.

I’ve not, using every available vaccine over multiple shots, ever had a single side-effect from a Covid vaccine. Except a slight soreness in the arm sometimes. That’s it. Is that common? I used to think it meant I had a weaker immune…

Another wonderful thread by Cory, this time on the need for all social media platforms to have ‘fire exits’ i.e. the functionality. to allow you to leave without losing your network of contacts. Blue Sky also doesn’t have fire exits.…

I think there’s more to explore in that ‘lock-in’, the occupation of personal and social life by these platforms. Now even the most basic personal and social transactions are becoming dependent upon being on one of these platforms. They…

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…

Fantastically useful thread for conversations with friends and family. https://t.co/SjIFbAmLqP

It’s emotionally satisfying to imagine that action against things like climate change and Covid is being blocked by a small cabal of evil [insert chosen baddies] people. The reality is more banal, and more difficult. /1 The ‘status quo’ is…

Both sides of politics see the energy revolution as a simple replacement of older fossil fuel generating sources with newer sources. But renewables fundamentally redefine what a grid is. They decentralise power itself, not just…

Cory again one of the things worth reading here. I think an example of Turchin’s concept of ‘elite overproduction’, the Trump team the gold standard example. It will fracture. Really battling nobles, surrounding the King, all fighting to…

When you ‘connect’ people, they will form teams, and those teams will then battle within themselves and with other teams, for status. In other words, you make the world a more violent place. Social media is a ‘connection’ technology,…

Everybody ‘vulnerable’ with Covid that is seriously injured or dies, caught Covid from somebody who wasn’t vulnerable. Societies aren’t gated communities. The only way to protect ‘the vulnerable’ is to stop the spread of disease,…

I think using the phrase ‘President Musk’ is going to fracture the Trumpian coalition of loons faster than anything else you might say or do.

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…

Long Covid is also Long Pandemic. I doubt 2025 will be the year we stop pretending the pandemic finished. A pandemic is still defined by the number and spread of infections, no matter what ambitious social status whores here or elsewhere…

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…

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

Human progress has largely been the process of winnowing the vast mass of human opinion into tiny hierarchies of knowledge-based leadership and guidance. It took millennia to achieve. Social media is the rapid reversal of this achievement.

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

If societies actually ran on information, writing would change them. They run on status. https://t.co/S0XblvAmrn

Please have a read of Turchin’s summary article here. It will save you wallowing in all of our modern economic and political framings of societies, that explain nothing. https://t.co/VonSYwz15j

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…

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

I often say here societies need to shut social media down entirely. People think it’s crazy to say it. These social media barons are now taking the piss. With complete impunity. Under cover of bullshit about free speech, which they don’t…

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…

The distant lands we read about and imagine are always far more accurately captured by that distant reading, than by going there to visit. Like a probe capturing Jupiter. Going there will take you further from the ‘real’ Jupiter than…

Office upgraded its air conditioning at the end of last year. Large office, a lot of people. CO2 reading today - 527 ppm. No Covid policy, but shows ventilation can be done right regardless.

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…

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…

By refusing access to platforms like this one and Facebook, the Chinese aren’t ‘censoring’ free speech. They’re blocking oligarchs from controlling their communities. Oligarchs who invent the fiction of ‘free speech’, meaning their speech.…

Trump’s executive orders today read like a revenge list in social media wars. Which is exactly (and all) they are. We’re living inside a social media bubble. A farce.

“This is what victory feels like.” Team sports. These keyboard warriors think they ‘won’ a country. Like it was a competition, with the country as the prize. This is what social media has done to our worlds. Out of control team…

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

Read through the executive orders and not one relates to an actual material problem facing the US. They’re all retributional culture war missiles. Our electoral system is now an online multi-player war game, decoupled from material…

I use Will’s book here so much because he captures so much of the work on status, so beautifully. It’s rank or status that drives humans. Not power, not wealth. It’s how rich you are compared to *others*, or how powerful compared to…

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

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…

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

Monkey-see, monkey-do. Some still sweetly think social media is about connection. https://t.co/hRlNox2Nr6

Those who beat their chests and say ‘government should be run like a business’ are about to get their way, in the US. I doubt they thought private equity was that business. Loot, plunder, destroy. https://t.co/7O1PXexaf6

We all know fashions change. Crocs are in again, for example. Do we think about what that means though, about humans? Just one more sneaky way status rules our lives. /1 https://t.co/aKjR1X8WQn Because it surely shows that what we like,…

Silicon Valley is dominating world politics. The Nerd Reich. It’s important to look at why that is, socially and culturally. Forget the technologies. Silicon Valley is the American Dream. Of get-rich-quick, the dramatic escalation of…

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

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’.…

Lovely summary of Piketty’s work by Cory here. Read it and tell me you don’t see the cyclic waves of status games and catastrophe, the latter being all that interrupts status games. Capital is the wrong measure. Status is the currency of…

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

Most democracy-loving ordinary folk think ‘the people’ is a thing, and central to democracy. It’s a term the European fascists invented. That and the ‘will’ of the people. The people is not and never will be a thing. https://t.co/UYM0DkuUtt

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.…

What ‘activists’ (usually righteous but not very bright) don’t understand is that all they’re achieving here is widespread anger towards, and abuse and vandalism of, ordinary peoples’ cars. And abuse of ordinary people who bought them for…

Anti-vax person today, ‘so you’re wearing a mask, still paranoid about Covid?’ Then regaled us with the story of how her baby has just had Covid, and ‘all the hospital said she needed was Panadol, how bad can Covid be?’ Thinks Covid deaths…

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…

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…

Toby Walsh here saying the things I’ve been saying for several years. The medium is the message. Social media is a far greater danger to society than AI. But we wont see that, because we’re addicted to it. 1/4 https://t.co/gpkyxqy1qq…

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…

When I first started posting about how Left/Right are meaningless categories, and really populism is about reinstating some form of King, and re-floating Church vs State, some thought I was mad. Hi to them. https://t.co/ZbwKLfyJlk

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…

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

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…

The more impotent our politics becomes, the more strident the language, as if that makes any difference. ‘Fascist’, and ‘oligarch’ current favourites. People love to say them, like ‘take that!’ Like throwing stones at tanks.

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…

It genuinely angers me to see the Tesla pile-on. I think what Trump and Musk are doing is criminally insane, but I never for a second think any sort of solution to that is to destroy Tesla. Righteous zealotry has replaced public life.…

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…

Some thought ‘living with a virus’ would be a nice, contained thing confined to Covid. And then suddenly we were living with every virus. Contagion is social as well as biological. Those cheering this on will, right up until the mob…

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

They’re the grown ups who don’t think running around all day yelling ‘fascist’ and ‘Nazi’ is anything except cartoon politics. They also see people setting fire to other people’s property and abusing them, and think that’s just a mob.…

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…

“…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…

The biggest story in the world today, and I doubt many will even see it. PNG shuts down social media. But read it, I bet it won’t last, because the enshittification of PNG life by FB is deep, as it is globally. @doctorow 1/2…

I’ve worked with local government, and I think we’re now past the tipping point where towns even exist any more, as a functioning entity. They’ve been replaced by a collection of social media groups.

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

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

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

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

I’ve lost track of the number of causes that think progress has been made because somebody managed to mobilise large crowds. The myth of ‘the people’ running politics. ‘People power’! Functionally it’s a rock concert, not power. People go…

I’m raising a 1500% tariff on all ‘content’ on social media. I invite people to look at their social media today, and every day, as a medium. Not as content. To think about what *social* structure it’s giving us, as a society. The medium…

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…

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

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…

When the Infinite Covids suggested we live with Covid, they meant that it would get a house of its own. It’s the lodger that never leaves. Chronic/persistent infection is the key that unlocks most chronic disease. Wonderful thread.…

The US is wallowing in a basic misunderstanding that defines its culture. That groups of people, of any size, think and feel and act. They don’t. It’s not even possible, how would it work? The US therefore sees every emergence of a…

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…

It’s not surprising to me that the people I know who argued that lockdowns are bad for us were the first to book an extra three days of leave over Easter.

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…

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

I think 27 million dead Russians probably did the most to stop Hitler. Just as they stopped Napoleon. https://t.co/MSCQIbRjTk

If you try to understand politics politically, everything is a surprise. If you try to understand it socially, as just one more way humans battle for status, it’s an open book. Labor won a landslide because the boomers no longer dominate…

Opponents of AI have a valiant idea about the amount ordinary humans actually think. Humans 99% imitate others, not think. A technology that aggregates those rare times we do think is not non-human. It’s a great weapon against our…

I had a thought experiment, where I voted for AI instead of social media (which runs our societies right now). I think AI won by more than a lap. https://t.co/1aKulypHb6

For all things there is a root cause. Reality is not multi-factorial. A root cause isn’t reductive, when chemistry realised atoms were the root cause of all matter, it didn’t prevent matter (or chemistry) being endlessly complex. The lives…

Every day I watch the substitution of our societies by social media platforms. Lots of wailing about why ‘we’ aren’t doing important things. This is ‘we’, now. What’s trending. Not an analogy. All that has collective attention and action…

There’s a LOT of AI being used in everyday work and even personal situations. I often wonder if over time we’ll start to see a shift, with orders of magnitude more intelligence being brought to bear on things.

The number one principle I think for all human health is: you must always control the spread of infection. I can’t think of a single situation where that isn’t true. Your immune system is a last line of defence, not front-line of attack.

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…

Shut down social media. It’s that simple. It’s a filter-free platform for stupidity. Previously institutions strictly controlled the capacity of stupidity to grow and spread. It’s now completely reversed with social-media-stupid strip…

I think the real shift with superannuation is towards ordinary people owning a much more substantial portion of collective wealth. Collectively, individually many still have little super, but it is a wider shift in the allocation of…

Societies don't run on information not because people are stupid, but because how would that even work? Which information? You could spend a lifetime just trying to digest the knowledge in a single field. Once you see that, it becomes…

Thinking back to when everybody was hashtagging masking, and me asking why that would change anything. And it didn’t change anything. Just saying. Social media will not fix the world, it’s the main cause of its collapse, no matter what you…

Somebody told me only ‘vulnerable’ people are impacted by Covid. I suggested vulnerable people get Covid from non-vulnerable people, and that if they believe the vulnerability rubbish, they have a responsibility to stop spreading Covid.…

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…

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

‘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.…

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…

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.…

I want to re-emphasise this point. Covid, like crime, like housing, like everything, is a networked phenomenon. It’s a much SMALLER problem than we think, and much more easily beaten. But you have to dump the idea of society as millions of…

Another re-share. Our problems are much SMALLER than we think. https://t.co/mm5d0So20I

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…

Great schematic. I think this needs to be extended to all infection. Chronic and persistent infection is proving to be causative for more chronic diseases all the time. That includes the biggies, like cancer, cardiovascular and…

I think this is the wrong message, missing the network dynamics of infection. Public health won’t be saved by asking ‘the people’ to do it. It’s much more accurately and powerfully perceived as highly skilled teams, doing highly targeted…

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…

I was thinking again on the weekend how our casual attitude to infection is another example of how success breeds normalised complacency. Antibiotics and vaccinations made us feel like Lords of our microbial existence. Microbial karma…

Well before Covid hit during Australia’s Black Summer bushfires, I wore a mask when walking to work, to the amusement of colleagues. I also think ‘hazard reduction burns’ are designed mostly to save property, at the expense of the lungs of…

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…

This is the exact sort of targeted thinking that needs to replace ‘Covid is everywhere, all the time’ that minimisers created to derail any public health action at all. Those who want to control Covid too often adopt that same framing.…

This, describing how America unravelled when it went from spreading out its differences geographically, in a live and let live way, and then suddenly everybody was ‘in the same room’. How did this happen? Social media. The medium is the…

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

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…

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

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…

The greatest enemy of kidult culture, which is social media culture (social media converted our societies into giant high schools), is expertise. Expertise breaks the kidult mindset. The ‘elites’, it calls it. DIY culture is kidult…

Of the fundamental forces in the universe, none come close to the imitative, status-driven conformity of human societies. Urging is powerless against it. This is the lunacy you arrive at when you think ‘the people’ run societies.…

A very intelligent and well-meaning person at work asked me today if I was worried about how sick I’d get when I stop masking. Millions genuinely believe they’re ‘exercising’ their immune systems by being continuously sick.

I don’t think debate is really a worthwhile thing to be engaged with. Our fantasies about what democracy and free speech mean lead us to believe debating is some sort of winnowing process, to produce optimal outcomes. I call bullshit. /1…

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…

What we used to call the ‘public sphere’ has been almost entirely replaced with social media, the space where we now transact all of society. Public policy is determined by what’s ‘trending’. That in turn is usually determined by…

The path to sanity? Focus on the material realities of our lives, the continental plates under the frisson of the team sports human status games overlaid upon them. Stop thinking which team’s leader makes a difference, or that the members…

Stories from inside a kidult bubble culture. The idea that feelings are independent things, to be lived. What I call the ‘culture of the feels’. Putin is happiest crushing resistance, cyber criminals happiest emptying your bank account. Is…

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…

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…

Herd immunity. The Mayo Clinic setting out the basic scientific reasons this should never work, for Covid. And yet it’s the global strategy, copied from the Great Barrington Declaration, a free market economic think tank. Let’s check with…

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…

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…

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

Thinking about the dispersal of what was once a fairly large, committed anti-Covid community on social media. Some of it still going, but not what it was. Change doesn’t come from activism. The inertia of the status quo is far too enormous.

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

Noah here describing the most critical front-line of our era. Between ‘horizontal’ and ‘vertical’ communities. The people you are closest to in thought and emotion are increasingly unlikely to physically live anywhere near you.…

I’m increasingly bored with social media, it traps people in adolescent cultural games of team bonding and battling, with other teams. Everything is a pile-on, and adult responsibility is replaced with symbolic ‘I Stand With’ hashtag…

What we desire is also what we think, what we feel, what we believe. We mistake all of these for the objects of our desire, we think what we like is present in the object of our desire. But really we like things because other people like…

We don’t really understand that as social animals, everything is social. Our deepest, most intimate likes or tastes too. Take interior design. For many years now minimalist greys and whites have dominated in homes. Why is that? Why do we…

AMerica is defined by anti-establishment thinking. All those dreary Westerns defined a zeitgeist that hasn’t shifted in centuries. https://t.co/qvPiATx7yj

I think worth reminding every single day that the checks and balances we see rightly as the root of democracy have their origins in the battles between barons and Kings, at the very top of social status hierarchies. Democracy never was a…

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…

Saying I had regular conversations with AI really fired up some of those whose understanding of technology comes from Hollywood movies. 72% of teens surveyed had used an AI companion. With all knowledge, always look at the conceptual…

If you live in a modern democracy, I think the Magna Carta is necessary reading. Only half-a-dozen pages. The foundation agreement that invented the original checks and balances we call democracy. Read it and you’ll get a very clear…

Cleaning Covid out of public spaces isn’t like cleaning up a broken glass. You don’t need to get anywhere near all of it. Just enough to get Rt < 1. It will exponentially decay just as quickly as it will spread. Disease control. The…

Australia’s main energy companies are buying up big with grid batteries. Unsurprisingly the much lower cost of generating the renewable energy to fill them isn’t being passed on to consumers. You can’t ‘market’ your way to a revolution in…

Humans mirror each other obsessively in social interactions. Imitation is the root of all human life. The idea AI is just imitating humans I think ignores that human interaction is mostly habitual and imitative already.…

Freedom of information seems an unalloyed good. But ask anybody servicing the growing avalanche of these claims every day what they think. Societies don’t run on information. FOI is designed to undermine trust in institutions. Much of it…

Experts I see here who are fine with doing nothing to restrict airborne spread of disease clearly don’t support water-borne disease. Which suggests their opposition is entirely their politics (or other team in some social team sport),…

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…

#Insiders the productivity roundtable would have been better replaced by any of the current AI models. Humans don’t think, they negotiate status in teams, as was in plain view at the roundtable. Exhibit A: the idea ‘supply’ is the problem…

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

If you think democracy means ‘the people’ running societies, social media has given you many years now of empirical evidence of how that turns out. How do you think it’s going? This idea of allowing anybody to be an expert on anything, and…

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 transition to renewables shows how human societies work. Objectively everybody should be celebrating this near-free energy. But as with all human change the status quo is more interested in its status, than in anything else. Only…

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…

I keep posting about status, even though the fastest way to become less read on social media is to avoid trending topics and status team sports. But the world appears absolutely batshit crazy using any other framework of understanding.…

The anti-vax champion at work is away again, terribly sick. I think that’s extended absence 4 or 5, this winter.

We in the West are end-of-empire people. That social-cultural fact barely rates a mention in analysis. End of empire cultures are so habituated to things in life just working out for them, that they can’t adjust. Food just arrives every…

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…

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

No amount of social media posturing in our various battling teams about ‘authoritarianism’ and ‘fascism’ makes the slightest difference to the collapse of the US. Lewis and Usmani offer us a glimpse as to why that is. In this one chart. /1…

From the same conversation about masking at work. “You haven’t been sick in 5 years?! Aren’t you scared how sick you’ll get when you stop masking?!” The immunity debt baloney really did its job in many. They honestly think being infected…

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…

Hilarious is our belief that humans ever spent much time being intelligent. Humans spend most of every day playing social status games, not thinking. Machines finally liberate actual intelligence. It may be a wrecking ball through status…

#Insiders thinking a battle between Left and Right is a meaningful thing. Left and Right are being swallowed by populism. Populists will be swallowed by populism too. It destroys societies. Left and Right are only social media teams. Likes…

I sometimes get accused of being anti-democracy. But my position is that there are no ‘systems’ of government in the first place. Societies are not systems. They’re humans, acting socially. Then labelling this behaviour in a variety of…

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.…

Given that most public thought these days seems to be just re-hashes of Hollywood movies, this is what Trump and Hesgeth’s trashing of their most senior generals made me think about this week. https://t.co/ZSB8oZpgjn

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’,…

The imminent arrival of ‘daylight saving’ time, which saves no daylight, fucks circadian rhythms and transforms Spring mornings into dark winter mornings, is another reminder that knowledge never runs societies. Status runs societies.…

Meanwhile the Anglo powers, including Australia, are spending hundreds of billions and re-writing defence strategy, to take on the ‘threat of China’. It must be the threat of ‘authoritarian’ rule. Unlike the freedom loving Trump and…

Conceptual leaps drive scientific progress much more than RCTs. I’m firmly with those who believe infection is likely responsible for most chronic human disease. We may be seeing the hypothesis tested in real time, right now. What a…

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

AI can be remarkable. I test it occasionally in areas that are my area of expertise, and what it can do in almost no time at all stuns me, literally gobsmacked. Humans mostly don't think, and never have. This is a liberation of thought.…

I see the false dawn of apparent ‘hybrid immunity’ in the UK has been rudely interrupted. Christina Pagel says Covid there is obviously ‘not seasonal yet’. Why (serious question) would we think it will ever become that?…

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…

As an engineer, often when I see people debating combustion versus electric cars, I think it’s worthwhile to point out to them that combustion engines from an engineering point of view are pieces of shit. And always have been pieces of…

I wonder if developing vaccines that took the acute edge off Covid infection, might end up leading to far more deaths in the multi-generational longer term, through the impact of widespread chronic disease. The vaccines needed to be used…

A revolution introduced fossil fuels into societies. We think the ‘market’ will drive them out. The true nature of the market as a defensive shield of bullshit to protect the status quo becomes more visible every day. It’s even worse than…

America’s founding refusal to acknowledge the role of some form of centralised status hierarchy to lead social life has led to what we see today. Everything is just a type of gang warfare, between rivals looking to occupy the ‘No Kings’…

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.…

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

Those who work with knowledge for a living tend to assume that’s how society works too, people thinking and processing facts. Societies run on status. On people imitating those with higher status, in teams, battling other teams for…

It’s amazing that change in human societies always follows the same mechanism, and every time we act surprised. Every significant change requires either an external or internal existential threat to the status quo. It is never about…

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:…

Popularity is the currency of populism, which is Western culture today. In populist culture, the only revolutionary is the person who thinks or does unpopular things. Not opposite to what others think or do, that’s populism too, creating a…

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…

It took a single day for rare earths to become the new team sport red meat. When you think ‘the people’ or ‘markets’ (hilariously, the same thing) run societies, you turn everything into perpetual battles for social status. Everything is…

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…

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…

The greatest enemy of human existence is infection. Worth repeating every day that most people who have ever lived died from some form of infection, the majority before they’d even reached adulthood. Pandemics are defined by the number and…

Wanted to re-share this thread. Societies. All decisions (and problems) stem from a tiny number of hubs, containing a small number of people. Target the hubs. The problems disappear. Like for Covid: target schools. No need to mask…

The function of social media is to take US culture, which has never had its shit together, and spread that culture globally. Silicon Valley had already previously begun that cultural expansion, with its libertarian bullshit ideals.

I see Vipin also copped some criticism for daring to say the pandemic never ended. Insist on applying the definition of a pandemic that has never changed in centuries. Number and spread of INFECTIONS. Not the politicised re-definition, of…

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…

‘Covid will always be with us’ is a political slogan, not science. Most infectious diseases will always be with us, it’s irrelevant to understanding a pandemic. It’s the same as ‘crime will always be with us’. It doesn’t mean ‘so let crime…

The GLP-1 trials on the really big chronic diseases that have evaded meaningful treatment for generations, suggesting that if we control inflammation the immune system might finally be able to clear the often infectious causation?…

Spend some time reading this instead of scrolling through the socials. The US is always at war with itself, it was set up to be. Trump isn’t mounting an authoritarian takeover of America. He’s its cultural endgame. https://t.co/GkD5cmh66w

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

Most social problems are generated by tiny numbers of people who form hubs in social networks. This account for example is one society could easily choose to shut down, to prevent misinformation on vaccination being spread to millions. And…

The term ‘lockdown’ is just politicised bullshit. Politics is always done with language, and the cynical anti public health fuckers knew what they were doing. To make people believe sheltering from a threat was imprisonment. In the comfort…

If we really believed the nonsense about democracy being ‘the people’ running everything, the entire world would have been run by Asia and Africa for decades already. We’re actually living the decline of the Anglo empire. Which thinks it’s…

@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…

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,…

Viruses form networks, with a small number of hubs. We have to think in network ways, not the catastrophising ways social media algorithms shape our societies. Respiratory infectious disease is a much SMALLER problem to deal with than we…

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

The angst over AI bemuses me, when we’ve had technologies for a while that are vastly more dangerous to societies, which attract little criticism or action. Social media platforms. They target our deepest addictive desires. Here’s why…

Fabulous infographic summary of Long Covid knowledge to date. https://t.co/luBsONVLKg

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…

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

They say Copernicus T-boned our human comfort because he took the Earth out of the centre of the universe. I see a similar de-centering happening with human thought, and AI. Many experts and others reflexively despise it, because it…

It may be optimistically naive to say it, but I do like that intelligence has gone viral. It’s a refreshing change from the viral status games of social media, which to me is an order of magnitude greater civilisational threat.…

AI suggested something to me that I hadn’t seen before. It recommended using an air purifier if isolating with Covid at home, to protect others. Good. But that this can also speed recovery, because the infected isn’t re-breathing viral…

If you think societies run with money, it’s bewildering. If you think they run by status, it’s intrinsic to everything humans do. Societies are 100% social. It’s status. Everybody will fight any attempt to create equality. Only…

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…

Humans would fight less if they had the humility to drop the hubris that they control reality and their destinies within it. Most of what happens in life happens to us, not because of us. We could unite around those external challenges. We…

Humans imitate, they create trends and follow them. No matter how idiot the trend, like wankpanzer vehicles. Imitative rivalry is the driver of all human thought and action. The fight for status, which is the fight for identity. We're…

Scrolling through the rich vomiting of drivel on social media, where everybody is now an expert on everything. And comparing it to the Republic of Letters. Which Stanford has been mapping. These platforms unravel centuries of progress. 1/2…

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…

Humans domesticate other species to ensure our own survival. As Paul Ewald says, we need to extend this to pathogens. They must be domesticated, towards lower virulence forms. Meaning adding TIME and evolution to the mix. Chronic, not just…

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.…

We’ve always been under assault from post-infection conditions. Cardio- and cerebrovascular diseases, as well as cancers and neurodegenerative diseases - the big killers - likely have infectious origins. With Covid we just have the…

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 genius of the Tupperware party was to understand that what people think and do is driven by social conformity. If you target the social networks rather than thinking of humans as information processors, you can have success. Now,…

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

Social media has always been a US libertarian attack weapon, to spread that culture internationally. Any attempt to regulate the platforms will be met by protest from whole populations, whose entire lives are now co-dependent with these…

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.…

“You’ve had Covid now, why are you still wearing a mask?” “Hmm, well I know you’ve had car accidents, why are you still wearing a seatbelt?” The only part of the brain left in widespread use is mirror neurons. To copy the idiot behaviour…

Can cultures who don’t consider time in any of their thinking come to terms with chronic as opposed to acute disease? Can they ever understand the true long-term impact of all infections? No. But here’s somewhere to start.…

The widespread disruption to social processes caused by social instability is a breeding ground for the generation and spread of novel pathogens. https://t.co/JQUqcHrj3e

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

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…

I think this platform de-prioritises everything you post unless you take a paid subscription. Which it’s open about, but I’ve had about enough of it.

The normalisation of the ridiculous is one of the clearest ways to see that societies run via social conformity (status), not knowledge. For example the idea of ‘living with’ pandemics, clearly ludicrous but now accepted common sense.…

No thought experiments or RCTs needed. Humans ran the trials over thousands of years. We know that societies with uncontrolled infection kill most humans before they reach adulthood, most before they even reach their teens.

I can’t emphasise enough that in the absence of strong institutions, the only public policy and action you will see is what ‘trends’. And those trends shift by the minute. Institutions embed multiple generations of knowledge, and act based…

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…

Again this is the huge gap in most people’s knowledge, the social basis for human thought, feeling and behaviour. Human beings aren’t fact-consuming machines, not information processors. They’re social animals. They pursue status, because…

One of the incredibly useful things AI can do for you is provide quick, detailed summaries of books. There are exponentially more books in circulation than anybody could ever read. And the book itself as a form can be a very long-winded…

Pretty much all analysis of inflation talks about supply and demand. Like societies are ‘economies’, a type of machine, where you need to adjust the settings. The economics that says the machine is a complex system isn’t really shifting…

I might be missing something here, but I read this as ‘AI doesn’t suffer as much from confirmation bias’. https://t.co/hkE6ziSP8b

@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’…

The basic model of how individuals think, feel and act will determine how we understand societies to work. So today, we tend to believe individuals are reasoning agents, processing information about the world to optimise their individual…

And more evidence that no human group runs on information or knowledge. They run on social conformity, to accumulate and protect status. Because status is identity. https://t.co/B9A7pV06II

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 greatest unsaid thing in debates about AI (notice like everything else, social media culture has transformed it into a team sport between two sides). Human culture has never been based on thought. Human life is based on habit, not…

AI making everybody smarter will lead to violence and social disruption/collapse, because that’s always driven by mimetic rivalry between people made more equal. However AI could also do the opposite, if its intelligence goes so far beyond…

Humans overwhelmingly don’t think. They imitate/emulate others, to gain and retain membership in social groups (or teams, as I call them), in rivalry with other groups. Apple is well behind with AI, it doesn’t surprise me they’re maybe…

Vaccination is failing because we’re misdiagnosing anti-vax as the population being more ‘hesitant’ about vaccines. The same myths we wallow in about democracy, that it’s led by ‘the people’. All change is led. Distrust in vaccination has…

I think the collapse of public health is seen most strongly not in so many medicos refusing to acknowledge or care about ongoing impacts of Covid. Medicine has always had a love-hate relationship with public health, a territorial turf…

The shift to celebrity as an income stream for writers and thinkers, with their social media and Substack followings, generates a demand for regular content that also triggers something more insidious, I think. Many become sudden experts…

The spread of infectious airborne disease in our communities is largely down to the fact we haven’t bothered with the same basic HVAC in schools that pretty much every other large public and private building has used for decades.…

A world where everything has become a never-ending argument is not ‘democracy’ in action. It’s a business model. ‘Flooding the zone with shit’. A globalised ‘look over there’ sleight of hand, while new wannabe Kings raid the treasury. I…

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…

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…

You can be completely anti-Trump, while still recognising that the destruction he’s creating is the only way societies were going to change. His team even planned that destruction. Their stupidity is thinking that destruction will favour…

Those who advocate for a muscular free speech as the basis for democracy like you to think it means a society being open to new things, a sort of free market of ideas constantly in competition. But argument does the opposite. It creates…

Ask Defence and intelligence chiefs about the greatest threats we face, and it’s not China or Iran. It’s social media. The social licence for these platforms to operate at all is based on a set of absolute rubbish beliefs about how humans…

We haven’t moved from a time when voters were smart, to a time when voters are stupid. We’ve always been stupid. Only institutions create social progress, by embedding knowledge gleaned from repairing catastrophic damage to societies. And…

The bizarre idea of ‘community consultation’ is a window into our most stupid and destructive beliefs. The idea that human groups, of whatever size, have some sort of collective will, a group mind that you need to survey in various ways,…

I think we need to be wary with the common explanation for populist movements, that they’re emergent from those groups who have been left behind. They certainly find an audience there. But populism is a universal iconoclasm, it destroys…

I can think of two other things Australians also refuse to use now. The Liberal and National parties. https://t.co/YoryYemffA

The assumption in discussions about AI that humans somehow were thinking before AI came along, and now they’re not, is almost too funny. Humans mostly don’t think in a ‘cognitive’ way. They imitate one another, to belong in a particular…

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…

This is Turchin’s ‘wealth pump’. When higher status people and groups hoard vast amounts of a society’s wealth, sitting on it like a dragon on top of its gold. Societies collapse when rivals within the status elites fight each other,…

Another way to look at this is that populism is always, and has been for thousands of years, a self-corrective idiocy that destroys a dysfunctional status quo. Populists think this is for their benefit, but they’re one of the first to be…

This is the root of all human thought and behaviour. Belonging in social groups, in competition with other social groups. Members bound together by imitative rivalry. We will never understand a thing by assuming humans act like a free…

It’s true that social progress is driven by a tiny handful of people. It’s not true that means they should be astronomically rich for doing it. The Republic of Letters was like a Justice League of elite thinkers and innovators, that…

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…

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

This has never had widespread popular support. The poor want to be the rich, not to tax them. Societies run on status. You have to target status, not the secondary expressions of it. https://t.co/lsa3Ve1SDq

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…

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

We’re living the existential risk of societies run by social status, absent intelligence of any kind. AI is one of the only non-catastrophic options to bypass social status rivalries. Research is already showing people using it as an…

The ‘status quo’ is really humans stuck in habitual ways of doing and thinking. People won’t surrender their status, which is also their identity. Only catastrophe brings change. Incoming. https://t.co/bJJCOBwiRt

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…

Who’s Who is in its 178th edition in the UK. It’s one of the best ways to ‘read’ a society, because it captures the foundation of all human collective life. Status. The thing we pretend ‘democracy’ took away. https://t.co/sGcuZYT0CU

Millions think the rivalry between the free market and the State is a real thing. It’s a fantasy Punch and Judy show. There no markets without States, and no States without markets. All societies are 100% social. All are run by a single…

We’re trapped in the Westphalian bubble. We think everything leaders do has to be framed through the lens of State sovereignty and democratic process. Those are both outcomes of the Westphalian agreements. Populism is reverting to…

It took 20-30 years between the introduction of combustion vehicles to Australia, and the existence of a widespread centralised fuelling network. EVs already well on track to easily eclipse that rate. Not least because a centralised…

It doesn’t surprise me at all that we think great intelligence is an existential threat to humanity. AI, for example. Intelligence absolutely is a threat to our standard way of being human. Our eternal rivalries over status.

I read that Google in its early days had a stringent hiring policy, with all (?) hires vetted from the top. The reason? A belief that even one hired idiot would become a nucleus of idiocy, within the organisation. There’s real wisdom about…

It fascinates me that Girard came to believe in a deity not through any faith, but via his study and analysis of the scapegoating mechanism in societies. He thought it was so deeply entrenched, that Christianity’s targeting of it…

I think the lesson from Farrer is that if you offer voters One Nation-lite, they’ll go with the full sugar version. https://t.co/v9lVghjJpx

Those with a bit of wisdom and long experience in running societies know this sort of thing is a critical breakdown in basic social functioning. You open this door, it doesn’t close again. The mob is indiscriminate. https://t.co/Cj5qQfbcv6

Rationalism is a type of religion, the belief that human concepts are the root cause of all things. You don’t even need to be religious to see the vanity in that, as if all knowledge and meaning in the world comes only from the human mind.…

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…

AI describing the Covid pandemic. If this is hallucination, I’m not sure the best word to use for the relentless tidal wave of horseshit I read on social media every day. https://t.co/0ZknO5oeh5

Who cares what people think? It’s like polling people to decide between optimum neurosurgery techniques. Most won’t have a clue. Nor should they, they have their own work. This is our delusional idea of democracy being ‘the people’ running…

Advocates for electoral democracy always assured us that compulsory voting would stop this shift in Australia. But Australia may be just one of the last legs of the Trumpian populism world tour. The Left-Centre-Right (LCR) hokey pokey is…

I was going to say I lost my hair without a clinical trial. @DavidJoffe64 thoughts? https://t.co/mHe2oUUeqZ

I would love to know how much the thrilling acceleration of progress in this and many other areas of medical science right now is thanks to the use of AI. From what I’ve read, it’s very heavily involved in the rapid progress.…

AI is transforming our culture in almost every way, in the same way that social media did decades ago. But much more quickly. And I think on balance in a profoundly curative way. AI is our only hope of rescuing civilisation from social…

A colleague asked why I keep masking at work. “I don’t like Covid.” “O yeh, worse 2 weeks of my life, I never want that again.” They take no precautions for one simple reason. Nobody else is. Humans think and act socially, not individually.

The ‘if you stop taking them you’ll get fat again’ criticism of GLP-1 drugs seems like saying if you stop any drug for a condition you have, it may flare. I thought one of the revelations of GLP-1 is that obesity is a metabolic condition.…

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

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.…

By far the most perceptive and intelligent things posted on this platform rarely get read or liked. Like this piece Turchin refers to, on why AI most likely won’t displace human workers, in the way people think. Technological disruption is…

Societies don’t (and never have) run on information. They run on status. The only time knowledge is used to better human existence is when status is attached to it. Victorian England and Rome both figured out how to do that. Both societies…

Intelligence has always been largely ‘artificial’, largely the use of tools. Even basic language is a tool, try thinking without its embedded and inherited wisdom. We worry about AI when we really should be shutting down social media. The…

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…

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…