Politics & government

It feels like the less actual impact people have on political decisions, the more strident their views become on places like Twitter. Like a compensation. As if these little dialectical ideas wars online can substitute for actual political…

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?…

@TurnbullMalcolm increasingly it seems democracy is being gamed by voter suppression? A longstanding trend. https://t.co/CDMHovQ0JM

I sit here every day listening to basic political questions being re-routed through 'economic' framings. The great victory of the conservatives worldwide, in the past 50 years, to substitute a weighted statistical construct - The Economy -…

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

The seductive simplicity of this graph is what allowed the substitution of an economy, or market, for society. That equilibrium point is said to be 'society', without need for government or regulation. Probably our greatest delusion.…

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

@dtsmith_sydney what are the chances of the filibuster being dismantled under Biden?

#auspol Do we ever get tired of populist fact-free public frenzies? For example on the Oz vaccine rollout. The same pattern of a stuttering start seen also in the US and UK. Standard logistics. Delivering population-level things is bloody…

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

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

#covid19 #auspol experts see 'living with the virus' as a control and vaccination process to achieve endemicity. Politicians and business groups see it as letting the virus circulate, with vaccines minimising damage. We must define terms…

@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…

#auspol public health experts should provide public health reasons for this obsession with opening up. The public is leading both government and expertise here, other experts understand why. https://t.co/X68YXuc5y4

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

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

#covid19 #auspol A pandemic is an ecological, social and political event. We've treated it as an economic and medical event.

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

@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 the government's man, out there arguing the politics, as usual, dressed up as science. https://t.co/dXkw9IEwP2

#auspol #covid19 Experts and politicians would say 'but only 58 people have died from the clots, out of just over 24.2 million jabs! That's tiny!' It's the numerator, dimwits. Nobody lives in the denominator. https://t.co/d0C2QsjV50

#auspol calm clarity. The amount of time wasted in this pandemic over petty political squabbles dressed up as epidemiology. We need a Centre for Disease Control, and keep politicians of all flavours well away from the task.…

#auspol #covid19 one of the few scientific voices strongly foregrounding prevention of transmission *and* vaccination. So many now guilty of vaccination boosterism, seemingly unaware of how politicians are playing them with their latest…

#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

#auspol #covid19 Pandemics keep killing until the social and political arrangements that cause them are changed. Right now rich countries want their old lives back, and assume vaccines will give them that without other significant change.…

#auspol #covid19 not only does a pandemic overflow any discipline, the longer it goes on. It also forces those within a discipline, epidemiology for example, to lay bare their political beliefs too. Decisions are based on values, not…

#covid19 @billbowtell the pandemic mostly a battle of competing political philosophies, not a medical battle. https://t.co/Yk4xdmyMRj

#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…

#covid19 #auspol many politicians around the world now talking about a 'race' between the vaccines and the virus. Isn't it obvious that this framing removes every public health tool, apart from vaccines? Narratives reveal agendas.…

Tonight I'm gonna party like it's March 2021. https://t.co/d4EAe9UhvK

#auspol there is no such thing as a political 'centre', it's a myth used by conservatives to drag all politicians further to the Right. https://t.co/lB1Gc2P9x5

#covid19 #auspol the Delta variant will test just what 'proportionate' means in NSW. Until now it's clearly been political code for 'we don't do lockdowns'. https://t.co/ujLkUWYqu9

#covid19 #auspol dumbfounded by the ongoing advice on risk in this pandemic. Lots of patronising simplifications from supposed experts. 1/8 The risk to an individual of a clot with the AZ vaccine is tiny. That individual risk is used to…

#auspol #covid19 the world already struggled with anti-vaxxers. Imagine the damage that's been done to future vaccination campaigns by the persistence with a clearly risky product, which has traumatised and infuriated even those strongly…

#auspol let's place a marker in the sand right now. This data on 2nd dose AZ suggests a problem. The TGA, ATAGI and government ignored these early signs for 50-59 for the first dose. I wonder whether we can be ahead of the curve this time,…

#auspol extreme libertarian politics has no place in a pandemic. It slaughtered hundreds of thousands in the UK, US, Brazil and India, and now NSW's leaders describe their public health approach in libertarian, political terms.…

#auspol #covid19aus from day 1 politicians looked to medical expertise only, preferably pliable and able to be house-trained to support underlying political agendas. That lack of diverse expertise for this most complex of all human…

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

#auspol 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 imagine the long, late nights in Macquarie Street, where government spin doctors agonise how to spin an imminent lockdown, while Kerry Chant bangs on the door and asks them to hurry. /1 https://t.co/eNMMxvunNN 'We're…

#auspol #COVID19nsw The Prime Minister: NSW shows the way to contact trace your way out of an outbreak without using lockdowns. The same nonsensical binary for more than a year. Contact tracing works up to a certain number of cases. After…

Contact tracing and vaccines so far tried as silver bullet fixes for the pandemic. Like hoping a bunch of flowers will paper over a dysfunctional relationship. Why don't people see that a pandemic is a complex socio-political event, not a…

#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…

#COVID19nsw #auspol even grown-ups get to play colouring-in. Another day where we wait to see if not locking down just leads to locking down, but one LGA at a time. 1/ https://t.co/DAYlamS0Tv 'Lockdown' isn't a public health term. It's a…

#auspol the idea that you have contact tracing OR lockdowns was an idiot idea when first weaponised by political spin a year ago. More lethally idiot now. How have more prominent voices not challenged this long before now? Asleep at the…

#auspol #covid19aus Covid 1, libertarian political bullshit 0. Given Covid comprehensively smashed the libertarian teams in the US, UK, Brazil and India, it's not clear why NSW felt selecting a live with the virus team would work better…

#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…

#insiders maybe after 18 months somebody might point out that 'lockdown' isn't even a public health term. It's a weaponised political term. And we're already 'living with the virus', enough of that Trojan Horse for a switch to a mitigation…

#auspol #covid19 when we turned our societies into economies, they lost the resilience to do the most basic act. Taking shelter. If societies had that resilience, to allow most to stay home for weeks, the pandemic would never have…

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

#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…

#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…

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

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

#auspol #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…

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

#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…

#ausol #covid19 drivel, from beginning to end. 'Fortress Australia', another weaponised political slogan. Australians have loved Fortress Australia, when it meant keeping brown people out. Privileged whining when it's applied on the…

#auspol the same calculations worldwide, on climate change too. Public policy driven by attempts to maintain fragile coalitions of reactionary and populist conservatives. NSW's Covid strategy the same. https://t.co/o5BmDO1HUr

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

#covid19aus #auspol the NSW Premier saying her government avoids 'burdening' people with restrictions. While leaders continue to make restrictions the problem, and not the virus, this pandemic will continue.

#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…

#auspol #covid19 @ProfJohnDrury the longer the pandemic goes on, the more we see that it isn't a biological/medical battle against a virus, but rather the endgame of deeply conflicting political beliefs. Beliefs that themselves generated…

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

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

#covid19 heretically, the UK might put its reality filters back on if it loses this game against Denmark. Right now the football is distracting the entire nation from the criminal, almost genocidal, decisions of Boris' government.

#covid19 Eventually all debates if they continue return people to first premises of arguments and ideas. In this case, ideas in health care around individual vs collective have also collided with political ideas in the same area. . /1…

#auspol #covid19aus more power to Gladys for strongly repudiating the boneheads in her own Cabinet who want NSW to live with the virus. Not often a fan, but good strong leadership this morning on at least that topic. Though just asked -…

#auspol Walter Lippmann knew why conservative politicians are often boring rich men in suits. "Success makes men rigid and they tend to exalt stability over all the other virtues; tired of the effort of willing they become fanatics about…

#auspol #covid19aus Have been saying this for 18 months. It's only when this threatens peoples' lives that Australia now notices. A pandemic is a political event, not a biological event. https://t.co/kDPoKwvpkw

#covid19 it's not news or surprising that putting animals in crowded conditions breeds infectious disease. Antibiotic use in modern feedlot farming is astronomical, to both fatten, and treat infection. But are we seeing the link to our…

#covid19aus #auspol count the 'please' in the NSW press conferences. The endgame of libertarian nonsense, treating society as individual customers. Please NSW Government, do the job you're paid handsomely to do. Increase restrictions.

@billbowtell @CrabbBrendan @Globalbiosec absolutely critical insights here from @ReicherStephen on the social, psychological and political understanding needed to defeat a pandemic. https://t.co/uV1gD8WVW3

#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…

#auspol #covid19aus by not ruthlessly challenging the NSW Government's 'live with the virus' statements at every point in the past 18 months, we've arrived. https://t.co/IIsH9hHRMd

@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…

#covid19 conservative governments from the first day of the pandemic have emphasised medicine, not public health. They’ve never denied it being for them about having enough hospital beds for the sick, not about preventing people becoming…

#covid19aus #auspol what sort of society knowingly and willingly infects its own children with a pandemic virus? When will even one journalist ask for a commitment from any Oz politician that children will not be allowed to be infected…

#covid19aus #auspol yes, sort of. We need to test by actually asking politicians whether this is now a priority because they’re planning for schools to have infection circulating within them at will. As in the UK. https://t.co/ssHhi1EENt

#auspol #covid19aus the most important graphic of the pandemic? The nonsense of the term ‘lockdown’, a set of strong public health measures to *free up* people to live normally. Political libertarians don’t understand how regulation…

#covid19 you can be so successful with political strategy that you can get ordinary working people to even desire their own death. The #EnoughisEnough craziness trending globally. In a sane society, it would mean 'we've had enough of this…

#covid19nsw #auspol pressure building daily is showing that the NSW Government is still running a 'live with the virus' strategy alongside the eliminate the virus rhetoric. 'Live with' meaning 'businesses open'.

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

#auspol #covid19 it's very clear in the NSW Government advice and Health Orders that employers across the entire State *must* require workers to work from home, unless it's not reasonably practicable to do so. I wonder how much compliance…

Modern conservative politics isn't government at all. It's regulatory capture, plundering of the treasury for vested interests. These parties have no real policy platform except cut taxes, cut regulation. Thus they can't manage anything,…

#auspol #covid19aus Barely removed from Trump's constant Fauci-trashing. If you say you follow the health advice, and then don't like that advice, don't pressure the advice. Just more attempts to disguise a total vaccine procurement…

#COVID19Aus #auspol together with removing the NSW Government for lethal incompetence, can we de-register journalists whose only question is 'when will you lift restrictions'? The grown-up version of 'are we there yet?' The virus is the…

#auspol #covid19 “We’re all responsible for own health”. No clearer evidence of how political libertarianism has undermined public health practice. Always look for the root beliefs. This is the very antithesis of the whole idea of public…

#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 #covid19aus this constant reference to our 'freedom' in today's press conference is obnoxious libertarian political bullshit. Ring-fencing hasn't worked anywhere, but is still the strategy. Vaccines seen as the salvation. We're all…

#auspol #covid19aus fighting a pandemic virus with political beliefs is like bringing a knife to a gun fight. There’s barely a word of this bilge from Hildebrand that isn’t a disgusting testament to the death cult of modern libertarianism.…

#auspol #covid19aus we have found the lethal virus in our midst. And it is called Murdoch. Our road to Oz-Trump continues. https://t.co/RlHLCC5Cx8

#covid19aus #auspol only some sort of constitutional removal of the libertarians disguised as a NSW Government can save us. https://t.co/jceIxs1zTq

#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…

#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…

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

#auspol #covid19aus it's called federalism. It's what made us succeed in 2020. Also curious that other experts, right up to the Nobel level, have suggested vaccines are not the solution to the Sydney outbreak. Another expert freelancing as…

#covid19 the WHO renamed viral variants with Greek letters to remove the geographical references. That's nice. But actually they should be named after the fuckwits of the pandemic, who generated them. The Trump, Bolsanaro, Johnson etc.…

#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 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 NSW Premier today talking about the 'ripple' effect of people 'not following rules'. This is how libertarians work. Abrogate their own responsibility to do anything (restoring our 'freedom' from government). Then blame…

#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…

#insiders #auspol the 2 things Health Hazzard says will end the NSW lockdown - individual behaviour and vaccines - both notably require the NSW Government to do almost nothing.

#covid19nsw Government incompetence is what brought AZ back into play in NSW in the risk calculations, cynics would wonder if that’s the reason no further restrictions are being added. The first clotting incidents will be interesting for…

#auspol #covid19aus the genius of conservative politics (again) now has us quibbling over single numbers as some sort of pandemic success measure. Just as they transformed society and politics into a handful of statistical measures they…

@sallymcmanus #auspol #covid19aus not sure which union covers contact tracers, but I bet if somebody were to look at their working conditions right now in NSW, we’d see the slavery saving the NSW Government’s flimsy Covid strategy from…

@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.

#covid19aus #auspol we urgently need to sit our top political journalists down in a room with our top public health people for even half a day, so we don’t get this continuous barrage of un-researched confusion every single day.…

#auspol #covid19aus I suggest we need a new ‘public health passport’, whereby politicians and journalists get no access to press conferences or decision-making until they have a basic understanding of public health principles.

#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…

#COVID19nsw #auspol when asked why the numbers in NSW aren't going down, the Premier blames - the people. No clearer proof of the direct conflict of interest in a political libertarian running for public office.

#auspol #covid19aus #covid19nsw the Premier with the daily magical mantra about vaccines. Get vaccinated, yes. But it won't stop this outbreak, the NSW Government needs to do its job. What happens when you follow the wealth advice, and not…

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

#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 #covid19 much of this pandemic is playing out as Camus would have predicted. Only a novel comes close to capturing the full complexity of social life. Some excerpts in Tweets, today about illness and life in an ‘Economy’. /1…

#auspol #COVID19Aus #nswlockdown watching the NSW outbreak is like watching Armageddon with your streaming set to quarter speed. Slow-motion train wreck. Seriously, the NSW Government needs to be constitutionally removed from power, for…

#auspol #covid19aus to expand on this. Twice now the reserve powers have been used to remove elected leaders. Both were Labor politicians. Both for trivial ‘economic’ reasons. Nothing shows better how the Economy is really just a tool of…

#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 Australia needs its equivalent of Independent SAGE in the UK. A group set up by experts once they realised the UK government was using SAGE (our AHPPC) only as human shields. We need expertise unconstrained by National…

#auspol #covid19aus #covid19nsw this advice to businesses from the NSW Government is interesting. They're seeing transmission even in fully masked workplaces. https://t.co/vstjVaYMpi

#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 #covid19aus hands up if you were disappointed this PM press conference wasn't to announce the removal of the NSW Government.

#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 #covid19aus #auspol probably the most stupid thing I’ve seen in a while, and it’s a tough field. I also wouldn’t put it past the NSW Government to try this, as Trump did. The Premier has expressed this as her wish many times.…

#covid19 the pandemic was never a medical or even biological event. It’s always been a political event. We’re listening to the wrong experts. https://t.co/Yk4xdmyMRj

#auspol seeing the vacuity of National Cabinet in this press conference. No decisions of note, Powerpoint summaries designed to promote the federal government. The national crisis in NSW gets mentioned, but no actions, no decisions.

#covid19nsw can somebody explain how ‘Operation Stay at Home’ will restrict movement, when most people are just going to workplaces the government refuses to close?

No @andrewprobyn, ATAGI shouldn’t have assumed Covid would enter the community. It assumed governments would maintain NPIs and quarantine to prevent that occurring. Those who deflect blame from the incompetence in government to expert…

#auspol #covid19aus It's beyond time we ditched the politically-loaded term 'lockdown'. Deliberately designed to make people oppose public health measures. 'Locked out' is more accurate, we're locking the virus out of society. Sheltering…

#auspol Afghanistan's aftermath is a lesson in modern conservative politics. Populist, reactionary decisions that play out across decades, leaving others to deal with the mess. Like flogging off public services and assets. The villains…

#auspol #covid19aus booster shots show the real politics in play here. Rich countries, and the rich within rich countries, see the vaccines as their ‘passport’ out of the pandemic, while the poor can be left to die. It’s standard developed…

#covid19 #auspol The ignorance of how political strategy works, the pandemic is about politics, not science. How did so many not see that the same libertarians who tried to 'live with the virus' by infecting millions, would use the…

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

#covid19nsw #auspol to be brutally honest, these protestors are orders of magnitude less dangerous than the NSW Cabinet. What they do pales into insignificance next to what the NSW Government refuses to do, every day.…

#auspol I’m certain non-Western nations watch on and feel that the democratic model is in its last gasps. Protestors against public health measures, governments actively allowing whole populations to be infected to protect business…

#covid19aus the genius of modern libertarian, populist politics is that both of these trending topics refer to the people being progressively infected by the government in charge, and not to the government doing the infecting. Fight among…

#auspol #covid19 conservative governments see vaccines the same way those people who badger their GPs constantly for antibiotics for a sniffle see drugs. The quick fix: “I don’t want to look after my health, just give me the drug’.

We mock this sort of thing. And it angers us. Rarely do we ask, how does it happen? It happens because democracy was only ever all of us getting to choose certain positions in hierarchies of expertise. We turned it into all of us being our…

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

#auspol #covid19aus if you're a bit light on the political machinations that lead to train wrecks like NSW, this will help. https://t.co/D7Wa8LPWeS

#auspol social media is brilliant in many ways. But what it's also done, which may mean we should seriously turn it off, has allowed vast pockets of ignorance and intolerance to mobilise and organise. It may be the tipping point that ends…

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

#auspol #covid19aus one of the co-authors of the Doherty Report contradicting what the Institute Director said late yesterday. Experts (like the Director, and Brendan Murphy) will discover that aligning yourself with libertarian…

#auspol #covid19aus there's a depressing predictability to the same experts surfacing every time the government finds its politics clashing with the public health advice, to back the government. https://t.co/s39UxfkbHG

#covid19nsw #auspol sadly NSW now rapidly approaching the point where the BS and blather from the NSW Government is exposed as utterly powerless against the catastrophe it generated. The only silver lining in pandemics, BS has nowhere to…

#auspol a tip for journos interviewing employees of the NSW Government, like NSW Health staff. They're not allowed to speak about what they know and see. It violates their employment conditions.

#auspol #covid19aus #covid19nsw nearly 1000 cases infectious in the community today in NSW. And the government's response? Talking about opening up. Only health system collapse may stop this lethal madness.

#auspol people are misunderstanding the UAP. Starting a new raving loon party that then fails gets you a permanent slot on SKY news after dark. https://t.co/vxY7kCDJi7

Viewing the UK from afar (Oz) the past nearly 2 years, that's almost the government strategy in a nutshell? Over the top straight into the German machine guns, with apologies to Blackadder?

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

#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,…

#auspol #covid19aus a message for the NSW Government and our PM. https://t.co/jdPUbikYIM

#auspol only economists could blame administrators for the political fuck-ups of the pandemic. Maybe they hadn't noticed that the FDA only approved Pfizer for use in the past fortnight. https://t.co/WHhEryZ12V

We talk about variants. Every variant to date has been produced by a political ideology, generating mass infection and mutation. A new variant today: the 'let's bring Aussies home at 80%' variant.

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

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

#auspol #covid19aus 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…

@auspol #covid19aus this is the real pandemic battle ground. Libertarianism. The US is simply incapable of seeing an institutional response to anything as itself a freedom. Government and its institutions are also the people, there’s no…

#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 the danger to those with a #UnderlyingHealthCondition is those trying to defeat a pandemic using an underlying political ideology. https://t.co/UiBXBCDoWI

#auspol #covid19aus the sentiment work the vaccine rollout team do suggests only 79% of Australians plan to get vaccinated. This is a very precise measure of how much your democracy has become infected with populism. The US and UK…

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

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

The idea of public health is anathema to libertarian governments, to them the 'public' is just individuals. Medicine yes, public health, no. They'll keep trying to use vaccines as medicines to bypass the complex social causes.…

#auspol #covid19aus pity we can't refer 'you can't eliminate Delta' to ICAC as well. But they are very busy with NSW Government stuff already. https://t.co/BzWy2CSeZI

#auspol #nswpol #covid19aus #covid19nsw it's a new low in NSW governance that the NSW Premier first reiterates the worst case and death numbers are in the weeks to come, and then says the government will now no longer front the daily press…

@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.…

Take your Godwin’s Law and stick it where the sun doesn’t shine. Casually allowing an infectious disease to become endemic and a scourge for future generations is like letting the Nazi party continue to operate after 1945.

#auspol #nswpol Nearly 2 years on, and still not one question to politicians who say ‘live with the virus’ about what it is they actually mean by that empty, vacuous slogan.

Up to 75% of the businesses some plan to save by ‘opening up’ would have failed anyway, inside 5 years, even without the pandemic. The ‘Economy’ isn’t a thing, we need to stop talking about it as if we’re living ‘in’ an economy. /1 #auspol…

#auspol #covid19nsw #covid19aus Delta was never the real problem. Lockdowns were softer in 2021 than in 2020, due to refusal by government to provide the same level of support to workers to stay home. Money is the best vaccine.…

#auspol #covid19aus the always evolving political slogan-variants, which in turn create Covid variants. The UK overnight. They now say ‘jabs, jabs, jabs become jobs, jobs, jobs’. You won’t see clearer evidence of how vaccination has been…

#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 all the idiotic passport fantasies. The passport is easy. People forget the border guard function, of checking and enforcing them. The entire population at war with itself, policing a politicised public health strategy.…

#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'.…

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

#auspol #covid19aus 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 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…

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

#covid19aus #auspol I see tonight Burnet modelling is the new target for live with the virus, anti-lockdown people. Is there anything they couldn’t turn into some sort of political culture war? What boring, fatuous people, what a way to…

#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 this is on the NSW Government's main page. "70% to reopen NSW" is surely not only false advertising, but also appalling public health practice? The false expectations this sort of thing sets up creates all sorts of problems…

#auspol #nswpol can’t add childhood vaccination to the roadmap, but can let construction rip unvaccinated. Those who doubt that the NSW Government is run by business, for business - what more do you need? https://t.co/M2Uggbzdq2

#auspol lot of understandable anger about this protest. But in reality, it pales into total insignificance next to governments opening up the country with barely half the population vaccinated, with plenty of vaccine supply and eager arms…

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

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

Take that. McVernon is a great epi, but since when did she become a ventilation expert? Coatsworth and Collignon infectious disease physicians who do the same, wade way out of their area of expertise with sweeping pronouncements. Experts…

#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 #nswpol #covid19 aus ⁦@RealOzSAGE⁩ Delta wasn’t ‘like nothing we’ve seen before’. It was what we saw last year, but this time without government support. So people had to keep working, get infected, and transmit it to their…

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

#auspol #covid19aus substitute any other infectious disease for Covid in that headline, and ponder just how debased our democracies have become. Imagine a million kids getting flu in a month. In sane times that would be considered an…

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

#auspol #nswpol it seems the NSW Government realised the daily press conferences were useful after all, because they get maximum public attention at least once a day. Utterly irrelevant live ads now being added, like addition of new…

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

#auspol #nswpol hey political journos. When pollies say infections/cases no longer matter, only hospitalisations and deaths do, ask them what those hundreds of thousands of newly-infected people will be asked to do, in the next 6 months?…

#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…

In the meantime over in political libertarian land, the enemy is still lockdowns. Not sure some of them have even noticed the pandemic. https://t.co/UrV19wgPES

#auspol #covid19aus "...the government had no choice but to ramp up restrictions for a month to avoid unnecessary deaths." If you don't reach 80% *total population* coverage as a minimum, you're back with restrictions. @stephenjduckett…

⁦@RichardfromSyd1⁩ ⁦@OrinCordus⁩ in which we see that the NSW Government interprets ‘partial TTIQ’ to mean ‘careful, there’s virus about’. https://t.co/112aawa7xq

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…

#nswpol #covid19aus “It is not about scaling back contact tracing, it will be the prioritisation…to determine where best to allocate our resources”. Dr Kerry Chant, saying ‘it’s not about scaling back, it’s about scaling back’. /1…

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

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

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

When you elect populist libertarians. Fresh from killing about 140,000 Brits with Covid and another thousand every week, with an idiot live with the virus’ strategy, now the UK has no fuel, because of libertarian Brexit. Libertarianism is…

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

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

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 #covid19aus Boris says the quiet bits out loud. This is the worldwide political libertarian pandemic strategy. Get back to work. https://t.co/y5Y5uMPj7G

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…

The Tories in the UK are trying to reframe trickle-down politics as ‘level up’ politics. Reminds me of the Simpsons’ ‘it’s not a pyramid scheme, it’s a trapezoid’. Also reminds me of Tories clapping for the NHS. https://t.co/C8Wp1SWIOd

#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

#auspol #covid19aus in our slavish copying of the UK Covid strategy in NSW and Canberra, we’ve moved to the next step. Where experts ‘only advise’, and ‘it’s politicians who make the decisions’. Meaning they ignore the advice. Like they…

#nswpol #auspol @RealOzSAGE Masks on the only unvaccinated group left in NSW ‘ludicrous’ and ‘restrictive’. If it walks like a Trump, and blathers like a Trump, it’s a Minister in the new Perrottet Ministry. A Deputy Premier even.…

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

#Insiders regulating social media. How about regulating media first? Some media owners use their licences as a platform for continuous political propaganda.

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 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…

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

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

#auspol #covid19aus Finally somebody asks one of the idiot political libertarians why Covid vaccination for children is any different to vaccination for measles, mumps and rubella. https://t.co/h2g0rokC4J

#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…

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

Normalisation, another political strategy. Working brilliantly everywhere, if we define that as ignoring mass infection and death. #auspol #covid19aus Questions you often ask, ⁦@RichardfromSyd1⁩, here are the answers.…

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…

#auspol the Coalition party room is like one of those family barbecues for your extended family, were you get trapped in a corner by a drunk uncle and his lifelong 'theories'. https://t.co/c0QNdnEA3J

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

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…

#auspol it's good we at least get to see the UK SAGE minutes. The official scientific advisory group to the UK government. The UK government pays little attention to them, as you can see from the minutes. Still, not buried in official…

#auspol #covid19aus the death cult of libertarianism. 50,000 cases a day, 200+ deaths (described as ‘mercifully low’), and the usual libertarian response - asking individual people to fix it. Simultaneously the UK government crying…

Describes exactly what we’ve seen in this pandemic. The deliberate assault on our public institutions, including our public health institutions. Politics created and prolongs this pandemic. @RealOzSAGE #auspol https://t.co/jMhKMki0mf

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…

This will be why the NSW Government removed mask mandates for gyms and dance classes this week. Their current public health strategy seems to be ‘hide NSW Health from public view’. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/wvBbRGpHDF

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

The corner shop represented a more resilient culture, logistically. The hyper-mobility that new forms of transport injected into our societies also stripped them of much of their resilience. Much of ‘freedom day’ type rhetoric is about the…

Another reminder that the NCIRS, which together with the MCRI is the government’s go-to for advice on schools and Covid, is an active proponent of the ‘No Jab No Play, No Jab No Pay’ scheme. For Covid? ‘No Jab, No Worry’. #auspol…

I’m surprised that the government’s climate strategy didn’t end up as a 70% or 80% towards net-zero target. #auspol

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

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

The 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…

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

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…

293 deaths yesterday in the UK. The government response: ‘get vaccinated’. The libertarians were always going to use vaccines like they use CCS for climate change - as a quick technical fix to restore business as usual. #auspol @RealOzSAGE…

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

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

All pandemics can be beaten, without a microscope. The basics: clean air, clean water, good food, less crowding etc. In some ways the development of medical weapons against infectious disease continually stalls attention to political…

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

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

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

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

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

What’s the point of our lives? Grant captures the libertarian shift. We have no collective goals, only individual goals. Identity politics of the self. Why we can’t solve climate change, or Covid. All diversity, no unity. No unity *of*…

“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…

Most expert debate on the pandemic is in the political-social-cultural area, not separate to the facts. There is no separation. An expert claiming facts clinch the argument for them is a Wally. https://t.co/rr7Pc9LkPD

We have doses sitting there, unused, right now. Why do we have to wait until vaccine efficacy has fallen off a cliff before giving the 3rd dose? Because (live with the virus politicians) say, all that matters is hospitalisations and…

Spent yesterday dealing with a single Covid case in a business. Via SafeWork Australia and NSW Health. Tied the whole business in knots, for 2 days now. It's clear now the PH burden is being deliberately shifted to business,... /1 #auspol…

The real politics of the nation are seen in our footpaths. Anybody who works with footpaths knows that the old collective public service ideas build and maintain them. Libertarian ideas are destroying them, with the smallest trip…

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…

All medicine is political. All science is political. Not 'influenced by' politics. Intrinsically political. 'Facts' never speak for themselves, and all facts are value-laden. #auspol #covid19aus @laurelleoz https://t.co/vgWNC7na9D

From the guidelines the NSW Government has issued to business to manage Covid in the workplace. Note the continued fantasy of 1.5m. But airborne included in residence time in a room. Vaccination makes all contact casual or low risk.…

“Let business determine their own risks, let’s get government out of peoples’ lives”. Stuart Robert, SKY News. The government is us - we created it. Most people I know do much better with government in their lives than they do with…

On the libertarian Right, parties are splintering into micro-factions of grievance. On the Left, purity of micro-factions has been the business model for years. Mirror images. Democracy will never work as only a diversity of views. #auspol…

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

Christian Drosten in January 2021, about Germany. 'Pushing the numbers way down', what the wise have said for 2 years, and every politician has ignored except in short bursts. #auspol #covid19aus @RichardfromSyd1 https://t.co/7Uav8gZV8Y

In which some paediatricians argue that what a government puts in a PHO is the gold standard for scientific advice. These same governments zealously removing all measures except vax is why some are now zealous, with vax. #auspol…

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…

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

I wonder if Omicron might be the thing that forces the government to relax its 6-month requirement on 3rd doses. #auspol #COVID19Aus @RichardfromSyd1 @OrinCordus @djf0001 @Bertrandization @YouAreLobbyLud @RealOzSAGE https://t.co/LR9BuGOByS

The data calls out the lie of these protests. The overwhelming majority of Australians have no time for it. But ideas are a type of virus, libertarian fantasy is getting its claws into many Australians, aided and abetted by populist…

The tiresome individuals vs government debates. It’s the same people. The people invented governments, because they wanted them. They’re staffed by - the people. They’re led by - the people. There’s no binary. It’s all just the people.

A leading political journalist on #Insiders describes vaccines as ‘our only protection’. There’s a due diligence requirement to learn even basic public health ideas, in a pandemic. Massive fail, week after week, from our Canberra gossip…

EU, US, Canada, Israel all now have approved vaccines for 5-11s. Several million children already vaccinated. Is the only obstacle for ATAGI approving it here the embarrassing political question - do we have supply? #auspol #covid19aus…

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

‘Proportionate’. Like ‘balance’, for a libertarian politician this means ‘not doing anything at all, to protect the Economy’. https://t.co/YoyoB5AT7O

A government with a laissez-faire response to pandemic viruses, and a DEFCON-5 response to unfriendly Tweets. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/TTM7LQg3a1

“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…

Faster than the variants is the development of political strategy and spin to head-off economic damage. Within a day of the announcement of Omicron, the 'it seems mild' spin-variant was already set to go. #auspol #covid19aus…

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

“National Cabinet agreed that the Commonwealth and state and territory governments will continue to pursue a suppression strategy, noting the objective is to limit the rate of Omicron incursions into Australia, rather than eliminate it at…

“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…

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…

Safework Australia. Last dot point, 'wearing masks'. In NSW most workplaces dumped masks because the PHO no longer required them. It won't hold up in court. Many businesses using vaccines as their main (or only) control measure. The…

One for the ventilation experts. Advice from the NSW government, to business. The first highlight - many workplaces are not providing masks, and nearly always not appropriate masks when they are. Second highlight - hand washing and 1.5m…

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

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

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

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

We don’t let politicians put out bushfires. Why do we allow them anywhere near a pandemic? Why does nobody question this? They have ZERO expertise in pandemic management. The definition of an emergency is that there’s nothing to ‘balance’.…

Easy to focus on the loons. But the vacuum they operate inside is the one left by libertarian leaders, vacating the driving seat. Political libertarians destroy leadership and government. It’s their core belief. Every lunatic belief then…

Yes Minster tried to show that politicians never actually run a country. Officials and experts do. We laughed as if it was all just a joke. When populist pollies pushed the officials and experts to one side in the pandemic, they killed…

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…

That the last sentence is even included is a sign the politics of Covid is still winning over the science. Most Covid cases don't end up in hospital, for all variants. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/qelCW3IMT9

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

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

Elected representatives should not be determining pandemic strategy. The definition of an emergency is something that needs to be dealt with, using known effective procedures, not consulted about. We don't have politicians.../1 #auspol…

We're so blind to political strategy. Privately the LNP spin-meisters love this stuff, it tells the lunatic fringe 'we're your people', and brings them into the fold. A telling-off by the senior LNP folk only cements that vote. #auspol…

Very hard to talk about democracies without sounding like an apologist for authoritarianism. But if Covid shows something, it's that democracies have been (mostly) pretty hopeless against existential threats. It's important we understand…

Supply and demand, one of the mythologies of economic society. The invisible (sleight of) hand, where questions of power and justice disappear inside equilibrium equations. If there’s not enough supply of something (e.g. cars),…/1 #auspol…

The first rule of modern conservative politics. Look after the private sector, and the private sector will look after you. Our Gladys heard your love Australia, she heard you say ‘get a lucrative job in the private sector.’ #auspol…

Can’t we just call a spade a spade? It’s been obvious since the beginning that most conservative governments will use vaccines like a type of economic viagra. With a chaser of ‘following the medical advice’ spin. No integrated public…

SKY Australia is just relentlessly ‘on’. Like all good propaganda arms of governments, re-working the spin every moment of every day. Yes NSW infections are rising, but it doesn’t matter people, there are no deaths. #auspol #covid19aus…

‘Proportionate’ measures in the UK (global spin). Omicron doubling every 2-3 days. Politicians shouldn’t make the call on public health, Tory MPs blocking new measures. Our epidemic waves are all political, not epidemiological. #auspol…

Stephen Reicher making such a critical point, that the idea of ‘restrictions’ and ‘lockdowns’ is weaponised political spin, designed to get people to oppose necessary ‘support’ and ‘protection’. The key political barrier to beating this…

Pubs and clubs leading the way. Property development, booze and gambling are pretty much indistinguishable from the NSW Government. Expect no action. https://t.co/um06leZWzP

Worth noting repeatedly that Covid is the only emergency response not being led by experts. We have fire commissioners, why can’t we have pandemic commissioners? Politicians will always weaponise disaster for short-term gain. They need to…

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

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

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

The political libertarians primed the Covid pump years before the pandemic. We're living the trashed societies they've created for us in so many ways. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/lJ5GfaPnSX

Risk management 2021. Government minister predicts 175,000 infections per week. Unknown morbidity and mortality of the infecting pathogen. Government does nothing. An employer would go to jail.

The NSW Government's new campaign. Classic libertarian stuff, reframing a collective emergency as individual responsibility. https://t.co/B0W8EjbMEc

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…

In which it becomes clear that the children of conservative politicians are without question raised almost single-handedly by their wives. https://t.co/4Q5JTteCfM

Spin generates feelings rather than information. In the information sense, 'living with Covid' for a politician means 'do nothing about Covid'. Just as 'balance' means do nothing. #covid19aus https://t.co/ns69Rx0jz8

With Australia spending over $300 billion to fight Covid, what consequences should there be for NSW leaders who ignored all of that and decided to just let Covid rip? Outside politics these people would be in jail. #covid19aus…

Variants should be named after the libertarian leaders who generate and prolong the pandemic. Append numbers [XYZ] to cover the sheer scale of variant generation. Trump XYZ Modi XYZ Johnson XYZ Bolsonaro XYZ Perrottet XYZ etc.

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…

Good luck finding a vaccination provider who has included this in their procedures. This federal government couldn't organise a fart at a whole food retreat. https://t.co/Km59JK6Bxs

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

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

Heck, politicians could even take personal responsibility for the jobs we elect them to do, rather than outsourcing them back to us while retaining their fat pay and super. https://t.co/Q06btxa9EX

No wonder the government is after social media. This leaked report from AHPPC to National Cabinet tomorrow is everything Twitter has been saying for at least 2 weeks. What’s the point of either AHPPC or National Cabinet?…

Strip away Doherty endorsement, and all some Premiers and the PM have left to justify what they’re doing is libertarian ideology. They want to push us to the next level of libertarian populism, the UK and US, where govt. is fully decoupled…

Have we noticed the gradual shift in Australia, from ‘always following the medical advice’, to the medical advice having to write pleading letters to politicians, like a constituent asking for their potholes to be fixed? #auspol…

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.…

How many times can we surf up and down epidemic curves before realising that the problem is putting politicians in charge of a pandemic? We don’t do that for any other emergency. Short-term media and electoral cycles and political ideology…

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

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.…

The main way we become puppets to political strategy is by arguing issues using politicians’ framing of a problem. Like the focus on Omicron severity. This is seen as critical only within the framing of ‘only hospitalisations matter’.…

"The notion that no government is good government is a debate topic, not a response to a crisis – and it is easily converted into camouflage for incompetence." Well said. https://t.co/i1nyL7Qq3N

I really liked this photo. It shows and symbolises the massive collective effort we’ve all made, continuously betrayed by venal, bastard politicians. Many of us saw the enormous betrayal already under Gladys, when she let Delta rip. All…

Can't stress enough that our fixation on severity plays right into the hands of Covid minimisers. Scientifically vital information, but political dynamite. You can wear a raincoat if your roof leaks, and stay dry. You're not fixing the…

Same pattern, again. Lockdowns aren’t a choice, the virus shuts society down whether you want it to or not. Spineless politicians wait for people to do it for them. That kills people. https://t.co/GZUYPYnckb

The NSW Government also rapidly weaponising this with new spin (‘might cause rise in cases’). So the growing mess is: 1. the Queensland Premier’s fault, and 2. this lab’s fault. The party of individual responsibility. #COVID19Aus…

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…

‘Just like the flu’ has been a political phrase in this pandemic. Look at the guidance on flu from non-pandemic times. Nothing about ‘living with’ it, or using vaccines to make it more ‘mild’. All about stopping flu. The idea we all choose…

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…

It’s surprised many that even most Premiers have now capitulated to let it rip. But it’s inevitable under populism, where politicians attempt to directly manage complex population-level events, bypassing expertise. We see that now,…/1…

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…

The CDC sets the bar twice as high for schools as it does for the general population. The reverse of politicians. And our 7-day isolation period doesn’t even require negative RAT tests for clearance. The Brits require *2* negative RAT…

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…

Australians have had a low tolerance for libertarian ideas. The 2014 Budget, a libertarian fantasy wish-list, is empirical evidence, it destroyed that government in 2 years. My gut feeling is libertarian pandemic strategies will be even…

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

Model conversation to reverse populism. A: Do you have expertise/training/experience in this area? B: no. A: fuck off.

Strip away the data and technicalities. The Anglo democracies have decided the way to deal with a pandemic, is to not deal with it. To let it infect at will. Not one journo says ‘if we don’t stop infections, the pandemic by definition will…

Media and politicians are silent on the ongoing risk to regional areas. Take Bathurst, a prominent regional NSW town. 120 cases registered yesterday, with the LHD saying that’s certainly an under-count. Most regional towns have few if any…

If herd immunity by natural infection actually worked, why would we still have colds and flus? Talk to ordinary people, so many of them infected with the chickenpox party idea that they just need to get Covid, to ‘get it over with’.

NSW Government announces pissweak non-measures that seem based mostly on the old droplet mythology. And projects 4500-6000 hospitalisations, and instead of saying ‘we’ll try to reduce that ASAP’, says ‘that’s within capacity’. Preventable…

I’m going to use this data to suggest that the political binaries that drive so much public debate are actually fantasies. Obviously the data shows that the ‘Economy’ is likely in more trouble now than at any stage of the pandemic. But…

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…

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

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

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

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

At a time when @RealOzSAGE and others have given governments clear advice to deal with the current crisis, what is National Cabinet discussing? None of it. Just more ways to force people back to work while infected. #auspol

We’re seeing right now the global clinical trial for neoliberal/libertarian ideas. When you try to run society as an ‘Economy’, this is what happens. The Economy is a political ruse, a statistical rationalisation of vested interest. It…

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

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…

Latest NSW Government report (13 January) says NSW Health has 15,230 Covid patients under care. Most will be in the home (well in excess of the capacity of that care modality). NSW Health projections from last week (graph). Maybe we should…

Politicians in Australia are living the pandemic rhetoric in reverse. From endemic attention to ending Covid, to epidemic bursts of effort, to sporadic indifference. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/chHIR2ufel

All hail the next diversionary spin. The problem with RAT testing isn’t that the government didn’t buy any, no. It’s price gougers. https://t.co/prBlHtBRkl

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

‘Confidence’ is a premium type of economic gaslighting. It’s not the amgydala, you pillock. As if we should be ‘confident’ to go out and get infected. It’s rational consumers responding to sociopathic politicians and economists.…

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

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

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

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…

From the UK. Teaching staff here should look at WHS options, as it’s plainly illegal to knowingly infect staff of any workplace with a notifiable disease. Government not even pretending, already lining up backup for staff they know will…

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…

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

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…

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

All facts are political. ‘Endemic’, for example. In the epidemiology textbooks it describes a pattern of disease. But its origins? It was originally used to describe the persistence of disease in poor regions/countries. Like a character of…

To deflect attention from their refusal to do anything, politicians told us to focus only on deaths and severe illness. So why aren't we focusing on deaths? Every day? Why is 70-80 deaths a day 'things going well'?

A week ago the NSW Government quietly signed an exemption to Public Health Orders to exempt employers from reporting Covid acquired in the workplace to SafeWork NSW. Now they only need to if an employee is hospitalised or dies. #auspol…

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

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

Public health action takes place within a society. But starting in the 1970s, society was replaced with an ‘Economy’. The greatest strategic political weapon ever conceived. Many honestly believe it’s an actual thing. As with climate…

Can only hope that if BA.2 gets really moving here, we have a federal government by then who believes society exists. https://t.co/F4JM3BU36x

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 -…

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.…

Mandates and rules are the most democratic way out of the pandemic. They apply equally, to all. ‘Personal responsibility’ is entirely at the whim of your ‘personal’ circumstances. Meaning it just stratifies Covid disease impacts according…

Really the pandemic has been a Randomised Control Trial for our core political ideas. The virus is just an amplifier of how those ideas play out in reality. Politics generated the pandemic, and only politics can end it.…

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…

This particular political metaphor (spin), ‘alongside’. The virus lives *inside* us, not alongside us. You can’t wave to it in the supermarket. Unless Tim means alongside poorer suburbs infected with Covid, in which case yes, that is the…

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

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 ?

Anybody else planning to off-ramp these political co-morbidities come May? Getting (this) government out of the lives of Australians? #auspol (No response needed, just a vote for anybody else. Except Clive and Craig.)…

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…

Prime Minister Alan Joyce angry with the delay in ending the end-of-life lives of people in WA. https://t.co/LY5YwtyVh9

50 years of libertarianism. No meaningful action against pandemics, or climate change. Rampant inequality. Soaring cost of living, stagnant wages. ‘Getting government out of our lives’. Who put government *in* our lives? We did. To save us…

I may have been unfair to #insiders by wishing they had public health expertise on their panel during a pandemic. As the show’s name says, it’s about what happens inside politics. And we know public health expertise doesn’t happen there.

Andrew Probyn trotting out the ‘balance’ line on #insiders, completely house-trained by government spin doctors. Such earnest pondering, as he weighs how many people we can kill to keep the Economy going. More eugenics, dressed up as…

The decoupling of deaths from case numbers seems to reflect the collapse of comprehensive testing, as governments give up. We have form in fixing disasters by making them invisible. Plenty of genocides for example use that methodology.…

When conservatives talk about being 'better economic managers', ask what economic things they've managed. For example the current government - what 'management' of the Economy have they done in this term? Covid stimulus? At other times…

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

From a public policy and Covid strategy point of view, those advising government have been wrong every single time they’ve called an easing of the pandemic. Those that haven’t are repeatedly called alarmists and doomsayers. How about we…

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…

People in Oz mostly follow government health orders. They may have no interest in the science, but people will assume it's safe to not wear a mask, for example, if the government says you don't have to. So much for 'wanting government out…

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

I’m already rehearsing my response at work when the NSW Government removes all masking mandates. “I take my scientific advice from scientists, thanks, not politicians.” https://t.co/CxGMlEbiJm

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…

Questioning the failings of democracy triggered the libertarian loons. The difference between democracy and authoritarian countries is simple. In one you elect the leaders, in the other you don’t. Both have leaders. Leaders direct people…

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…

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

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

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

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…

For populist governments, a 'problem' is defined as anything that they're responsible for inside a 3-year electoral cycle. Pretty clear what that means for problems like climate change, and pandemics.

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

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

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…

Why are we pretending the pandemic is over? Because the wealthy are now comfortable they're protected. No sarcasm here, this is the literal underlying political reality. Working people can get sick and die, there are always fresh workers.…

Australia needs a national surveillance survey. Politicians are deliberately trashing data to hide public health damage. “For any real-time health surveillance system to be reliable and cost-effective, it cannot rely solely on…

Like others, I’m pushing daily in life and work against a tidal wave of politically-engineered Covid fatalism. ‘We’re all going to get this, let’s just get it over with’. Populist politics needs to go. The problems facing the world can’t…

Again, is it too much to ask a politician, those who have the opportunity to do so, what the plan is when the current vaccinations have waned, somewhere around winter? What’s the ‘living with the virus’ plan then? #auspol…

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

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

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…

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

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.…

If we’d called SARS-Cov-2 ‘Putin’ instead of Covid, it seems our leaders may have actually done something to keep it out.

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

I imagine the terror Putin feels hearing this. https://t.co/BPKtrmvg4Y

Getting government out of peoples' lives just puts other governments into their lives instead. The rich West descends into libertarian fantasies of free-floating individuals, leaving global politics unoccupied. The Russians and Chinese are…

Here we are nearly at the end of February, and the ‘weekly’ NSW epidemiological report, about the only useful Covid data the NSW Government now release, is still the 29 January version.

The most disastrous thing Putin has done may be to take the world’s attention even further from the pandemic.

Superb from Stan Grant today. My two cents. All politics is identity politics. The West now sees identity only in individuals. Russia and China see it in a nation, a race, in geography. The West needs to ask ‘who are WE’ rather than ‘who…

‘Mental health’ is becoming a bit of a catch-all to describe political issues. The brutalising politics of the ‘Economy’. Neoliberals medicalised a pandemic so they could ignore it. It suits them just fine for us to attribute blame for the…

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

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

It's like living in a George Orwell novel, sitting here every day watching political libertarians talking about the pandemic being over, while the bodies pile up. Crimes against humanity, glossed over with cheap political slogans.…

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…

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

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

Tomorrow is wear a mask to work day. Every day is. The only people you need to socially distance from are politicians, and other Covid minimisers. https://t.co/Lpk5EQqisi

I'm the only person wearing a mask at my workplace this morning. It highlights the nonsense of libertarianism. People will wear them if they're required, by government. Otherwise not.

10 reasons I give people for why I still wear a mask (in case of interest). It's good to have comebacks ready. 1) I'm focused on the vulnerable in our community, not myself. 2) I get my science from scientists, not politicians. /1 #auspol…

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

You’d only need 2-3 stories like this in the news every day to derail the whole living with Covid rubbish. You can understand politicians suppressing it, but what’s the conspiracy of silence from media outlets? Nobody gives a shit about…

This is where reframing the entire pandemic around hospital 'capacity' pays off for politicians. Hospitalisations and ICU still trending down. Cases trending up. https://t.co/FS49gbLjkz

The most recent NSW Government guidelines for Covid isolation require people to restart isolation, if somebody else in their household develops Covid while the family is isolating and they haven't been distancing from them. Haven't seen…

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…

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

The targeting only of people ‘at risk of severe disease’ is the carrying over of the political targeting of marginal seats, to public health. Picking only the politically dangerous outcomes for action. https://t.co/3l4JzGY4IZ

The political libertarians at work again, trying to individualise collective events. Floods become your ‘personal responsibility’, via your insurance. Insurance is like hospitals for Covid, should be a last line of defence, not front line…

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

I suspect that the deliberate infection of the Australian community fundamentally misreads how Australians perceive the role of government. Australians are not at war with their institutions, as those in the UK and US are. South Australia…

So, if you’re a journalist, isn’t now the time you’d ask the NSW Government why it removed masks in schools, claiming cases are ‘extremely low’ there? #nswpol https://t.co/WgRs9B8U78

Every edifice of N=1 politics is starting to crumble. Let’s go back to that old-fashioned idea of common-wealth. It’s still in our name. https://t.co/nOjMv1JFmF

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…

The ‘my body is a temple/natural health’ types are the apogee of libertarian politics. The individual as gated community.

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…

Living the NSW dream. A friend tells of staff at work with kids at home badly ill with Covid. Staff are there because they've tested negative on a RAT, as per government rules. The kids have only been sick less than a week. No masks…

"Prevention of severe illness from COVID-19 remains the primary goal of the ongoing COVID-19 vaccination program." Once politicians make that the framework, mass infection is just assumed. https://t.co/IvQwJstG7t

What we’re seeing right now with Covid is the politics of privilege. Decades of living as if humans have no Earthly constraints, steadfastly refusing to be brought back to a life with sensible constraint. Climate change the same. Reality…

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…

Every day, the basics. - all infection is illness. - public health controls illness. - mass infection is a failure of public health. - public health was invented by governments. - public health is a government’s job. - the ‘Economy’ is a…

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

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…

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

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

The endgame of populist conservative rule is always some form of absolute monarchy. Trump was the most King-like of any monarch worldwide. https://t.co/yKQ8lOpsWY

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…

My expert Budget analysis. “Here’s some cash, please re-elect us to government, so we can get on with the job of dismantling government.”

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…

Speaking to employers about vaccination. It's fallen off a cliff, their staff won't now get a 3rd shot, and fluvax numbers for the coming year also only a fraction of previous years, for many. Prime example of how a fish rots from the…

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…

National Strike. Politicians and captains of industry, if you want to live with this virus, go for it, run a Covid camp somewhere. Fuck off and leave the rest of us alone. https://t.co/JjYtrK4YGA

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

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

I’m not convinced we can fully understand epidemic waves purely in terms of some dialectical dance between virus and immunity. So many things lead to infection, many of them social, behavioural, political and geographical.…

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…

From the FT, UK. Politicians desperately want hospitalisations and deaths to be the metric. But back here in reality, infection = sickness. Communities are sick. Ongoing mass infection cripples societies. Infection is the metric. It’s how…

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

I 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…

‘Lockdowns’ were the perfect test case for neoliberal, libertarian politics. They made us into isolated individuals. The libertarian dream. But it stopped their society substitute, the ‘Economy’, stone dead. Nobody is ever free, alone. We…

It’s not a vaccine ceiling. It’s a governance ceiling. A vacuum where leadership was needed. Thus, everything ground to a halt. What happens when you elect governments who don’t believe in government. https://t.co/757YVJ6Opq

The NSW Government has doubled its leave provision for employees, it seems. When booking your leave, use the ‘Kerry Chant’ code to automatically turn 3 weeks into 5 or even 6 weeks.

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

It feels like a sane democracy should preclude from running for office, any person or party whose platform is 'we hate government and want to dismantle it'.

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…

The federal government's take on Long Covid is unsurprisingly the same take it and all other Covid minimisers have on everything Covid. Get vaccinated. Yes, people have done that. They're still getting Long Covid. https://t.co/LcqTHfkoD4

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

Epic public health fail. Cheered on by epic political failures, and their expert enablers. https://t.co/g2zIDChECt

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

Come on Patricia, enough with machine-gunning the government’s talking points. As if anybody in Australia even cares who Richard Marles is, let alone what Ministry he’d like to have. #insiders

“The government says you are a stinky poo bum. Are you a stinky poo bum?” What passes for political journalism in 2022. #insiders

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

The country runs just fine, without politicians to run it, in the caretaker period. Because politicians don’t run the country. They never have. If we understood that, we might save our democracies. https://t.co/2lfgOkLKES

So, we’re away. The choice between a government who doesn’t believe in government, and…anybody else really. Anybody who wants to do any sort of governing at all, by definition would be better. https://t.co/B2xbiQnFDy

This is the time to see the reality underneath what we call the 'Economy'. The government is campaigning on 2-3 economic metrics (unemployment, growth etc.), but people know their wages are still going nowhere, their jobs are insecure,…

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

Political strategists don’t believe in voter compasses. They know that any person can be all over this grid, depending on which issue they’re asked about. That’s how they get people to shift their vote. It’s also why the idea of a…

Mapping of peoples’ ‘moderate’ political views reveal they’re all over the ideological spectrum. But it goes deeper, mapping of even one person’s views is all over the spectrum too. Winning in politics is not about sides, it’s about ideas,…

About 6000 Australians have died since the NSW Government unilaterally decided during the Delta wave to shift the Australian strategy to let it rip. That's not far off the Australian lives lost at Gallipoli.

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

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?"

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

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

Today's suggested press conference question. "Prime Minister, what percentage of workers are currently at home sick because they're infected with Covid?"

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

In today's trivia, name 6 Australian political leaders who have abandoned "any interest in Covid whatsoever". https://t.co/P8qsFtn0BO

If you have expertise, and you also have political views, that’s obviously fine. But save the public a whole lot of confusion by not disguising the latter with the former.

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

Today’s virtual press conference question. “Prime Minister, how will your planned $184 billion in tax cuts to the wealthy find its way to aged care, roads, schools, hospitals, climate action and legal aid? A working bee for the well-to-do”?

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

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

So much of this pandemic has been an old battle, between public health and medicine. Medicine has the power, and thus the loudest voice. I doubt the distinction between these 2 fields is even widely understood. Much of the tension between…

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…

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

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

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…

Politicians who preach personal responsibility never show any. None of them ‘hold a hose’. What they actually mean is that the job they’re responsible for, is now your responsibility. https://t.co/IZfWl02UpS

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

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

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

Do you reckon: 1) business has realised removing close contact rules is the government shifting liability from itself, to business, under WHS? 2) people realise they’ll have to use their own sick/carer’s leave (if they have any) to stay…

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

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

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…

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

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

The original United Australia Party of 1931-45 performed the same role as Clive’s. To vacuum up cranky conservatives on the fringes. Conservative politics in Australia has been a reactive movement to protect entrenched privilege. The ALP…

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.…

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

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

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.

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

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

More accurate in the case of Australia to say that one faction in our internal politics, the extreme libertarians, forced a change to national strategy by using one state, NSW, as a Trojan Horse with Delta, to break the national…

Public health professionals have political views too. And you can’t do public health without involving politics, because what’s good for the public is a question of politics. About time these core political beliefs became part of the…

"The Prime Minister said if re-elected the government would continue to act on the medical advice because it has allowed Australians to live with COVID 'without fear'." I haven't seen any aetiology of Covid illness and death that includes…

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

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.…

The PM is relentlessly trying to bed down US and UK-style libertarianism here. All the ‘getting government out of peoples’ lives’ guff. But who invented government? We did. All of us. To help us, to provide economies of scale for our…

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

Watching political libertarians every day trying to return society to the time before we invented government. That time that sucked so badly that we invented government to fix it.

@QandA ah Gigi is back banging the freedom drum. Political libertarianism is the crown of thorns starfish of democracy.

@QandA why are we listening to a political libertarian economist for the umpteenth time on Q&A on a public health problem they simply don’t understand?

@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

I feel it's important politicians and the public understand that if Covid is damaging the immune system, like HIV does, that it takes 8-10 years for HIV to turn into AIDS, in people. Even a 'mild' Covid infection is potentially a ticking…

Dan on fire here. For politicians and minimisers, it's the time for reckoning. https://t.co/yNBazgfbzP

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

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

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

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

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

For 30 years the LNP has been trying to introduce the neoliberal/libertarian politics of the US and UK. Those beliefs are poison to a communitarian Australian culture. Those furious at what we’ve done with Omicron are mostly so because of…

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

In live crosses to different seats, notable that LNP candidates have predominantly LNP-TV (SKY News) on in the venues. The party now lives in that tiny bubble. #auspol

The shift in the LNP John Howard introduced, towards US-style neoliberalism/libertarianism, has now gutted the real ‘base’ of the LNP, falling to independents. The lunatic Right of the LNP have gutted the party from the inside out. The…

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…

Australian political parties pre-John Howard didn’t talk about their ‘base’. For all parties their base was the entire Australian community. That’s the Australia we need to get back, with the (base) attack politics of the UK and US…

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

Chris getting angry, and trying to slap us out of the ridiculous complacency we’re being encouraged to live by venal half-witted libertarian politicians. https://t.co/h1UW3XVNYv

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

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

It feels good to have got the government out of our lives. #auspol

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…

Bridget Archer on RN this morning hitting the bullseye. Saturday was a victory over tribal, ideological politics. Better tell SKY News Oz, which is still telling everybody the problem is we weren't tribal enough. Australia is still barren…

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

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

The PM and Ministers have been in ‘briefings’ this week. From the people who actually run the country, and should, the Department heads. The mythology of politicians running the country needs to end.

Former prime minister Kevin Rudd said the Australian public service “has been eroded through political appointees, private contractors and institutional decline”. K Rudd sees that the decline in our democracy is down to institutional…

That the AEC even have to respond in this way is a testament to the vermin we've allowed to infect Australian political life on the conservative side, and in their propaganda media arms. https://t.co/xJCUpR8kPX

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

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

Why if you want a better representation of Australian political trends, you need to aggregate all primaries under broad labels like progressive and conservative, rather than parties and coalitions. https://t.co/Cec2UorhIe

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

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

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

It’s not so surprising modern conservative governments chose to ignore a pandemic. They’ve been trashing government for decades. It’s more surprising how many experts lined up to help them (unlike Lisa). It’s they who allowed the…

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…

If the ALP win majority government, if they’re smart they’ll make sure the teal independents have plenty of wins, to give those electorates no reason to want to return to the LNP. #auspol

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.…

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

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

‘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…

Incidentally, for those who aren’t aware, the NSW Government runs a ‘nudge’ unit, as the Tories do in the UK. It’s very modern conservatism, seducing people into changes that they actually don’t want and often aren’t good for them.…

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…

“People are moving on when the personal risk is low. There’s nothing politicians or healthcare providers or the media can do about that.” (N Coatsworth) Public health was invented in direct opposition to this belief. As was pretty much our…

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

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

Listening to the first interviews with the new LNP leadership team, not one indication they plan to shift direction at all. The strategy appears to be 'target the outer suburban tradies with more Trumpian dog-whistling, and that will…

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

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

“Jim Chalmers could reduce the deficit to zero within three years by increasing the ratio of tax to GDP from the 22.4 it is now to 24.4 per cent – still among the lowest in the western world.” (Alan Kohler.) Alone that’s wow. But it also…

My hope is that eventually we’ll see the ‘Economy’ as our own Emperor’s New Clothes. A political fiction designed to bypass politics with a handful of self-serving statistical indicators. GDP being one of them. We’re mistaking the measure…

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…

Well said, and so often not observed is how human groups without ‘strong leadership’ just reinstate it in other ways. Including surrendering their agency to corporations or populist despots who are even more authoritarian than any…

The Teals stumbled upon the heart of Australian politics. Community. We’re a communitarian country. Not capitalist, or communist, or socialist. Community is a politics, independent of scale. A politics defined by social relations, not…

What more could we do to defeat Covid? Treat it like a bushfire. Put experts in charge, while politicians get out of the way. Why did we let politicians lead the operational work? Especially ones who 'don't hold a hose'? We smashed HIV…

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

Recent decades saw the strip-mining of workers’ wages and conditions. The ‘Economy’ boomed during this time, join the dots. It’s a bunch of statistical indicators favouring the interests of employers, invented by pollies to replace…

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.…

Too much wasted time arguing science in this pandemic. We had public health systems and procedures tested over 2 centuries that knew exactly how to beat Covid. The reason they didn’t isn’t scientific, it’s political. It’s the same politics…

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…

I'm more concerned that: - Covid is killing hundreds a week and government says nothing - people are catching a potentially lethal virus multiple times, and no public health mitigation is occurring - we're infecting everybody at will with…

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…

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…

The politics of the Economy adapted easily to Covid. ‘Confidence’, for example. Consumers ‘lack confidence’. Meaning they have no money, and have to be seduced into going further into debt. Conservatives are skilled at seducing people into…

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…

Your body is not a temple of health, it’s part of an ecosystem of other living things, that is healthy or not. Just as you’re not an individual customer of democracy, you’re a citizen of a community, that functions or not.

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

Demographics and politics. We knew the demographic tidal wave of the boomers was eventually going to arrive at aged care. That’s where we are now. A country heavily reliant upon care and related services, with few younger workers available…

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

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

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.…

If you’re already sick of Albo because he hasn’t fixed your pet grievance after 3 weeks in office, you’re part of the populist problem.

Supporters of the new government will require patience, so often progressive political wins are trashed within a single term by the puritanism of belief of its own supporters. It’s quick and easy to destroy society, it’s much, much harder…

The danger of populism is the belief that politicians ‘run’ a country. They never have. Thousands of expert officials do that. It’s incredibly complex. Fixing the LNP mess will take those officials years. Not a magic wand from a new…

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

It’s clearly not over. And it won’t be over just by having enough hospital beds. Hospitals don’t stop Covid @AlboMP, hopefully you’re getting wider advice than the previous government. https://t.co/WuAvRHHGyw

If you want to change the world, join a bloody union. Twitter won’t do it. Organised political action changes the world. No matter how loudly you want to yell your opinions, it will change nothing unless the change is organised.

I’m not a union organiser or ALP member. But the way the vast majority of the population have always organised themselves politically, is unions. And their political parties, like the ALP. The mess of the past 50 years is simply a lack of…

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

That employers don’t see this as the shifting of risk to them, away from government, probably shows how little they intended to do to implement risk management measures anyway. https://t.co/QcaDt8Kuq5

In the constant debate about our Head of State, everybody talks about the ‘Head’ part. Nobody talks much about the ‘State’ part. It’s the much more urgent, existential problem, rescuing the actual machinery of democracy from the…

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…

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

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…

Mark Butler interviewed about Covid this week, repeated the line from the previous government that leaders have always followed the health advice. We have multiple clear examples of this not being true. No journalist said boo. #auspol

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

I hear politicians say we’ve entered a new phase of the pandemic. Do you reckon it’s the more than 50 deaths per day phase? Up is bad, right? #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/2FE49YGShA

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

Two things in relation to public health, in times of Covid. 1) It was invented by governments, to keep societies functioning. A government who removes public health protections is like a government giving its military slingshots instead of…

We won’t defeat Covid until we understand it not as a medical or even scientific problem, but as a political one. Public health can’t function when you’re governed by political beliefs where the public doesn’t exist.

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.…

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

For the umpteenth time, all of the diseases we immunised for before Covid were mostly not ‘severe’. We still didn’t let everybody catch them. Time for expert regulators to step outside the straitjacket framings of their political masters.…

Whether it’s climate, Covid or abortion, very loud minorities are holding sway over majority and expert opinion. That’s because the loud minorities understand political strategy, and the majority don’t. It’s smoke and mirrors, a massive…

Governments who wind back public health protections in favour of business activity, when a pandemic is surging, are demonstrating clear regulatory capture. They’re little more than point men and women for business. #auspol #covid19aus…

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

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…

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.…

Silicon Valley is one of the engine rooms of modern libertarian anti-government politics. And yet libertarianism always was an embarrassing lie, because who built Silicon Valley? The US Navy. Government is what gives libertarians their…

A couple of weeks ago 40 deaths in a day was around the national average. Now NSW is mowing them down in those numbers, alone. Political and health leaders who say nothing more needs doing, smile for the Royal Commission camera. #auspol…

@michellegrattan any chance of you stirring up the somnambulist press gallery to force a government response on this ongoing carnage? Including refusing the 'this is deaths with, not from, Covid' spin politicians use, a blatant lie the ABS…

See how 'stopping the boats' never really stopped the people arriving (thankfully), all a political stunt. Stopping the planes did though. https://t.co/HDh0jLeYa7

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…

That ‘national mood’, if true, is just the successful marketing campaign of ‘living with the virus’, deliberately propagated and reinforced over the past year. It’s a political ear worm, coming to fruition. https://t.co/SLbdWZwAfq

We follow the UK Covid strategy (do nothing) to the letter, so have a look how that’s going. In the UK the spin has rubbed off, people are seeing the herd immunity debacle for what it is - the politics of privilege pretending to do public…

When populists talk about 'unelected officials', they're talking about people selected on competence. As opposed to elected officials, who are chosen purely on popularity. They pretend that's 'democracy', because they know popularity is…

Governments follow a herd immunity strategy for one brutal reason. To them we are literally a herd. Livestock. Replaceable by workers from anywhere else in the 'globalised economy', if needed. This was the actual plan, when nations were…

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 challenge Western democracies face is the need to de-program populations from decades of political propaganda - slogans and spin. Pick any issue and it's like pushing shit uphill, fighting the slogans that now pass as reality, and…

When was the last time any Australian politician, from any party or even an independent, mentioned Covid? When not explicitly asked about it. #auspol

OK journos, here's the primer for the next time you ask politicians why they're casually allowing tens of thousands of infections per day, and hundreds of deaths per week. Because they *will* BS you with 'those are deaths with Covid, not…

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…

The other glaring thing about Mark Butler's appearance this morning was his assumption that the only alternative was for the government to spend more money. What about the business community and its basic WHS responsibility, for a change,…

The new government wants 'vaccines and treatments' for Covid. Let's be Africa, who has few of either and is kicking our arse. O wait, they don't test much or collect data, you say? We've already got that bit covered. https://t.co/cO05F8uE27

Less than half of Australia has had a flu shot this year, despite free jabs and urgent messaging. Covid vaccines still stalled. Politicians did this, minimising the risk of infection for economic purposes. The public health system may not…

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…

So epidemiologists are deciding what the public will or won’t support? On what evidence? And is that part of their job brief? Or are they regurgitating political messaging to stay in a job? https://t.co/vyAFOeCpzn

Governments and sympathetic experts have devoted most of their time in this pandemic to ‘messaging’ the low risk of Covid to populations. Having succeeded, they now use this as a reason to continue to do nothing. https://t.co/VqQlidcRbj

Listening to the car radio on the way home about how quickly communities have mobilised with the floods. That’s what Australia does, with fires too. It could do the same with Covid, if politicians and motivated experts stopped running…

“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…

In emergency operations centres politicians just get photo opportunities. The emergency is managed by experts. We do this for fire and floods, but for pandemics, the most lethal of all disasters, the experts get photo opportunities, and…

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…

In politics, what is popular gets done. It’s always been the job of a politician to make what needs to be done, popular. Covid minimising politicians refuse pubic health measures, saying they’re unpopular. But they made refusing them,…

"The pandemic isn't over", politicians say, in grave tones. Followed by...nothing. Like saying 'these fires and floods are out of control. Have a nice day.' https://t.co/feuZKorltt

Thanks to @SuffragetteLane for sharing this one. The magnitude of the catastrophe we may be in the middle of is light years from what the public is told. Also an excellent critique of public health professional failure, with lashings of…

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…

Populist politicians try to convince people that politicians run countries. They don't, they wouldn't know how. First the US, and now the UK, discovering this the hard way. https://t.co/tsUFv7VIWJ

We can rescue democracy with a simple change in beliefs. The job of a politician is to make popular the things that need doing. The things that need doing are advised and carried out by their officials.

Let's not blame any more institutions for political failures. In what world would 1-2 more years of lower rates tip the balance between affordable and unaffordable new mortgages? https://t.co/YVDhVfEmSb

Covid removed all of them. Political journalists fiddling on their phones swapping their insider gossip won’t see or understand that. https://t.co/e7w1U8rls9

The greatest lesson for democracy would be to not replace governments at all for a year, in a situation like the UK. People would see the country continue to run, quite calmly and smoothly and without fuss. Politicians don’t run countries.

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

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),…

NZ and Albo now parroting ‘personal responsibility’ too. It’s the personal responsibility of a political leader to lead a country out of a pandemic. Let’s have a new populism, one that rejects ALL politicians as populist windbags. #auspol…

Albo repeated this exact same drivel in a press conference this weekend. It killed thousands in NSW after Christmas. Politicians who don’t understand that public health is something THEY invented, staffed by THEIR staff, to beat pandemics,…

For progressive politicians frozen in the headlights of conservative Covid slogans, asking people to take ‘personal responsibility’ for a pandemic is like asking them to regulate air safety and road construction. #auspol #covid19aus

Hey @jacindaardern and @AlboMP, surrendering to the conservative spin that the only alternative to mass Covid infection is more government measures betrays your political traditions. Most people catch Covid in workplaces. Enforce WHS law…

Regulatory capture, when the mechanisms of government are captured by vested interests. Seen in modern conservative parties having only a single major ‘policy’ - cut taxes - no matter the situation. It’s the unmediated conversion of…

Politicians and CHOs/CMOs seem all to be captured by the LNP framing of the pandemic. All believing you either lockdown/mandate things, or do nothing. But the public is everybody, make it a multi-layered response. /1 #covid19aus #auspol -…

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

Not 'mixed messaging', it's the use of vaccines as drugs rather than as part of an integrated public health strategy. Also pandemic leave was government funding business' failure to follow WHS requirements. The ALP should use that as a…

‘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…

NZ is the same as here, masks required in some situations and not others. Business there (as here) is mostly exempt from having to provide or enforce masking. Always follow the money, in politics and in a pandemic. https://t.co/GX9Y9qAxrp

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

Professor Ian Harris was speaking on RN about how increases in life expectancy over the past 150 years are overwhelmingly the result of public health measures, not medicine. The exact same public health (I'll add), an arm of government,…

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…

The danger in Albo's consensus project, modelled on Hawke, is centrism. Finding a consensus somewhere 'in the centre'. Politics has been dragged first to the Right, and then into populism. There is no 'centre' now, cosily between Left and…

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…

More than any country, Australia knows how to mobilise as a community for a disaster. But rather than tap into that, effortlessly, political leaders imported culture war nonsense from the US and UK, saying Covid mobilisation was taking our…

It's excellent to see the penny dropping, the previous government's Covid response was largely about using its libertarian political ideology to replace basic public health practice. Those are *fundamentally* incompatible belief systems.…

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

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…

37% of Australians now have no statutory sick leave. Brought to you by the party of getting government out of peoples' lives, and business into them.

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

The reason we ‘can’t afford’ to beat Covid, and the reason most of us catch it, is work. Business. Covid is a WHS issue, but we’re told it’s up to government or us personally, to fix. As always, we’re privatising the good times, and…

It’s remarkable how often the health advice is a verbatim match with what politicians say in the week leading up to that advice. Watch the pollies when the advisers speak, it suggests the true direction of information flow. #covid19aus…

You can believe democracy means all people getting a say in how society is run. But the facts will be against you. https://t.co/8KjdxGU4Tb

Decisions are not made ‘by the people’, even in a democracy. The people follow the lead of somebody, be it leaders, experts, influencers etc. The opposition to masks and other public health measures is being led, but is described as…

The idea that the public lead the country, and politicians have to follow them, is libertarian nonsense. 'Strongly encourages', asking the public to do things. In reality the public are looking for direction, without it they'll follow what…

"The Prime Minister explained Australia would move away from isolation mandates when the Australian public develops a 'greater acceptance' of staying at home when sick or with flu-like symptoms." lol, the mandates are to teach us to stay…

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…

For the 'you're Hitler' freedumb folk, saying the public don't run democracies is just a statement of fact. In a representative democracy the public vote for representatives to run the country for them. It's in the name.

Broken record, but the options to beat Covid aren't: 1. government spends tens of billions more, or 2. the public accepts mass infection. We've been played, as we were for climate change. The answer is: 3. business funds the basic WHS,…

Where we are now with Covid, with calls for ‘personal responsibility’, is a road we already travelled with climate change. Not a coincidence, the same fuckers using the same strategies. Collective problems as individual problems IS…

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…

There's the moment in Groundhog Day where the Bill Murray character recognises he will have to change fundamentally to escape the infinite loop of suffering. 7 times around the loop isn't doing it yet, for politicians.…

People who vote for populist anti-establishment pollies aren't voting for freedom. They're voting for a single autocrat to replace all government. They don't even deny it. Never, ever believe the freedom narratives. Of speech, of…

Another politician on the radio at lunch time, saying schools must stay open. Just looking through my press clippings for any politician (or health adviser) saying in this pandemic 'children should not be infected with a pandemic virus'.…

Public health paradoxes. Where we use ‘personal choice’ in banking, or supermarkets etc., despite the ideology of choice everything coagulates into a handful of monopolies. Give people ‘freedom’ and they *always* reinstate hierarchy. Why?…

Something about Twitter. I rarely use it as a mobilising tool to try to generate wide public action, because most of the public never use it. (Last estimate I saw was less than 20% of Australians). But the small proportion who do are often…

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

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

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

The 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…

The fastest way to figure out who politicians represent in politics is to watch where they end up after they leave. https://t.co/Zv0Q2HW6T5

One of the reasons Covid is such a mess is that the previous government medicalised it, refusing to listen to a vast range of other expertise about what causes and stops pandemics. Medicine is where a failed pandemic strategy sends people.…

Neoliberal governments despise public health systems, and trashing services so as to be able to sell them off is 50 years old. No Tory is losing a minute’s sleep over this, they see Covid as a tremendous opportunity to keep destroying…

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

Ordinary working people here are now equivalent in status to the billions in the developing world we’ve left to their ‘endemic’ diseases for years. Market-based politics made us all interchangeable. Business is looking to double the…

Albo on SKY agreeing decisions on mask mandates are decisions for politicians. But on the basis of health advice. The current health advice is everybody should be wearing a mask, in most indoor locations. So…where’s the mandate to reflect…

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

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…

One of the windows into the success of political libertarians is the absence of any sort of collective ‘moonshot’. No ambition to achieve anything much at all, except personal lifestyle goals. The pulverisation of politics into ever more…

Another example of a mandate, doing what they do. Not boss people around, no oppression here. Providing a framework for collective action. Tell the political libertarians to quit their whining and fear-mongering. Every day.…

These numbers, we know now, won't shift a single thing, politically. When you relentlessly 'message' and lead that society is an 'Economy', not even death will be a bump in the road. The Economy is humanity's most lethal invention, with…

This is the Covid equivalent of a first homebuyer's grant. Government money used to 'prime' the Economy, but actually making the situation much worse. Thankfully now expired, but with the damage already done. The purpose of the scheme was…

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

I love the intent, but it feels like 1980s Hawkean politics applied to 2022 problems. Growing numbers of people see the enemy as institutions themselves. Kumbaya won't fix that, you have to fight. Beginning with shutting down the…

Social behaviour is led, it isn’t spontaneous. Why are Australians not wearing masks? Because they were led to refuse them. People ‘take their lead’ from…leaders. The politicians who led the ignore Covid and masks strategy? There they are…

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…

I like Jim. But watching him stand up every day to talk about inflation, interest rates and the ‘economy’ reminds me how politics has been captured by the financial industry and its backers in conservative parties. All politics now is…

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

Politicians unilaterally decided we would all be infected. Consent comes into play here, as it does for intimate relationships. Unlike those, SARS2 infection crosses all degrees of intimacy, from strangers to lovers. The freedom to not be…

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

Defeating the myths of the economy defeats Covid. A biggie - ‘business’. There is no such thing as business. There are customers, workers and managers. Customers buy things, which pays the managers and workers. Nick Hanauer knows it. /1…

Football, of all varieties, seems one of the most powerful ways to ignore reality. The UK is on its knees, but football keeps everybody drunk on the hopium. Here in Oz football was one of the Covid dambusters. Its team sports mechanism is…

The shift from mental health problems being almost ignored pre-pandemic to them now becoming epidemic/endemic is partly by design. Political libertarians gaslighting us to believe government and business clusterfucks are all problems in…

Exponential increase in house prices did known damage to the 'vulnerable' for decades. We did nothing about it, in fact government egged it on. Exponential societies need exponential growth to function. Why they won't fight Covid.…

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.…

The breakdown of inter-generational society, the flattering of the ‘circle of life’. Speaking to 20-somethings can be a window into where society is heading. Yesterday: ‘so how long are you going to keep wearing that mask?’, with a clear…

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

The plundering of Australia's gas reserves by fossil fuel multinationals is populism at its finest. The royalties? We're giving it away. How did this happen? Politicians signed contracts they didn't understand. They bypassed the officials…

More evidence of complete regulatory capture of government. In the UK Covid has now created ‘apocalyptic’ conditions in healthcare. The response from the governing libertarians? ‘We need more tax cuts’. They’re not a party, they’re a host…

Some of us have been trying to get focus on stringency data for more than 2 years. It shows that elimination of a pathogen is the best ‘economic’ thing to do as well. Unsurprisingly, public health systems, invented by governments, save the…

Another day of political leaders, captured by big donors, letting the planet be incinerated, and a pandemic run completely unchecked. If you’re an expert helping on either count, does it get boring counting the pieces of silver every day?…

Alan Kohler has been consistently great in calling out the elephant in the room. Market-based politics is dead. The market and its handmaiden the economy have been exposed as ludicrous self-servicing fictions. https://t.co/7KoJkvhdmQ

Privatisation, the market, the economy. Strip away the slogans and it’s just a massive cost-shifting from the collective treasury to private wallets. Getting government out of peoples’ lives just puts business into those lives instead, for…

Follow the actuaries. It's the epidemiology of Covid stripped of political spin and assumptions. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/XsdBeXr1vI

The ‘property ladder’ is more aspirational political libertarian BS. The true property ladder is the one on the right. https://t.co/HTX5nZyL0j

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

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

How does an infinitesimally tiny group in our society, the top 1%, attract mass support for policies that clearly benefit nobody except this tiny group? And how does it keep doing it, generation after generation? Graphic from ‘The Gilded…

Does this say ‘government is oppressing you’, or ‘please stop so you don’t crash into other vehicles’? https://t.co/gN0GOkoMkB

The reason the Reserve Bank has to create such pain by changing the price of money, is that government no longer invests in anything. So the price of money becomes the determining factor in privatised nations. Also, the Reserve Bank is a…

Another false binary in this pandemic is government funding furloughs, versus letting the virus rip. Why aren’t the businesses and schools people returned to after furloughs safer from Covid? What is the actual point of WHS? #auspol…

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

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

Just once in 'open for business' NSW you'd like to feel that electing a government = getting a government. The libertarians don't even hide their determination to remove government from our lives. Booze, property development and gambling…

Lethal Stupidity: How the Palaszczuk government’s COVID response has thrown Queenslanders under… by @ColinKinner https://t.co/pWVeRFM9Q2

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…

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…

"Everything that goes wrong in a nation first goes wrong in the heads of those who dominate it." Monbiot superb here on what happens when you elect governments who don't believe in government. Cost of living, Covid - all caused by the same…

Imagine a butcher hiring a staff member who was a committed vegan, who said in their job interview they wanted to destroy all butcher's shops. And yet we elect governments whose platform is 'getting government out of peoples' lives'.

Clearly determined to head-off public health action from Day 1. He wanted joint health and finance portfolios, to him this was an economic emergency, not a health emergency. Unlike the UK we managed to remove the vampire squid from the…

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…

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

Illustration of how the pandemic is intrinsically political. The greatest difference in ‘epidemiology’ here? The political beliefs of the different nations. Same virus. In Oz, the loss of control of the virus in 2021 was entirely due to…

Here’s one from the front-line of the RCT on neoliberal and libertarian political beliefs. Person sells own pension to pay for cost of living explosion, then dies of Covid, leaving children orphaned. https://t.co/6ROxH9tboU

Uncanny that taking ‘personal responsibility’ in a pandemic nearly always ends up looking like taking collective responsibility. People banding together to empirically disprove the nonsense libertarian political beliefs of our time.…

Taking on 3 ministries and doing none of them is real commitment to getting government out of peoples’ lives.

In local government entire councils are replaced with a single non-political administrator when they’re deemed to be incompetent. State and federal governments? Populist grandstanding on basic services that any administrator could do for…

The political libertarian fantasy of gated communities of the vulnerable, shielded from Covid, nicely shot down here. And to go further, because the fact it doesn’t (and can’t) work also empirically disproves the core belief of that…

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

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…

In the final Act we see that for political libertarians, individual freedom is really just their own, to do what they like. Add populism to the mix, and what is most popular is always singular, not multiple. Authoritarianism is…

The Ministerial fiddling gets all the populist attention. But the previous PM had been covering all of the bases, with Covid. First escalating Brendan Murphy to Department Secretary, who then supervises the CMO and TGA.…

If you’re persuaded to buy one brand of TV over another, you’re unlikely to become a fundamentally different person to your neighbour. This project discovered that the ‘polarisation’ of politics is a thin veneer of marketing overlaid upon…

I don’t want to join the pile-on against institutions. Politicians corrupt institutions. But for Australia too, the job is disease control and prevention. Not death control and hospital bed management. A society that is widely diseased is…

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

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

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?

Catching up on last week’s #QandA. The cause of inequality is individualist political beliefs feeding off collective wealth. Free-loading, free-riding off collective wealth. Generating that wealth collectively but pretending we’re doing it…

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

When you frame public health action politically as an assault on peoples’ freedoms, this is what you produce. Easy to blame the suggestible people who get caught up in the spin, but you need to blame the people who do the framing.…

Australia made community the centre of its politics. Other countries mobilise around territory and political ideals. It’s an astonishing innovation, making social relationship the core. It’s now failing, the ‘Economy’ is sucking the life…

We miss how Oz politics really works. Australians act as a community. All through the 20+ years of federal LNP resistance to renewables, Australians ignored their bullshit and as a community installed our own solar, at world record pace.…

A tiny increase of tax-take relative to GDP would erase these deficits in 1-3 years. And about a third of our overall public debt is printed money and could be just written off. Some quite simple changes would change our society…

Hilarious that Labour in the UK has a shadow ‘levelling up’ Minister. Levelling up is just a conservative reframing of trickle down. Progressive politicians dance like puppets to conservative spin. https://t.co/AbhDuUhncw

Not really getting any better, is it? Still a busload dead a day, in NSW. Not one word from the NSW Government, not one question to them from journalists about this production line of death, month after month. #auspol #covid19aus…

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…

We should attack institutions only when it’s absolutely certain they haven’t been knee-capped by venal populist politicians. And that’s done sometimes in very subtle ways. https://t.co/8s3aovYOX8

Experts can be such patsies. As if compressing isolation periods represents any sort of public health progress. Just tell your political masters ‘sorry, this is bullshit, act to reduce transmission’. https://t.co/aKyffZhNUr

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

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

There isn’t a clearer way to see that politics that attacks government itself and its institutions, such as public health, is the cause of this pandemic. Strip mining the economies of scale of collective institutions leaves individuals…

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…

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

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…

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…

Covid minimisers inhabit the same universe as tabloid journalism. They know individual stories like this are the most powerful weapon, politically. Why you never hear them now, they bury them in statistics. Then they bury the statistics.…

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

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…

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

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

“In a pandemic, scientific advancements and modern medicine don’t matter if people won’t take it.” Matt Koci, virologist. People won’t take it because the politics of our day framed public health action as oppression. Progressive politics…

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

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

Albo is like Biden. Tricked into implementing conservative Covid policies, the only point of differentiation being he’s a ‘decent guy’. Decent guys don’t preside over the death of thousands of people and do nothing about it. Decent voters…

The framing remains that the pandemic was really an assault upon free individuals by their governments. Nothing about infections at all, the actual definition, which are allowed to carry on with impunity. The ALP like a kangaroo in the…

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.…

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

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

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

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.…

Individual freedom is the politics of the privileged, where the invisible labour of others can make it possible to believe you can shape reality to your individual whim. When you infect, sicken and kill those invisible others, the fantasy…

Climate scientists are a long way further down the road than Covid scientists. They know what decades of being ignored feels like. ‘The science’ has no political power of its own. What to do? Change politics. The fastest way? Mass joining…

Governments do nothing about Covid because they do nothing about anything. They represent privilege. Unions were always the counterbalance. They’re the way the politics of ordinary people are enacted. Like them or not, mass, even token…

We’re so domesticated by the politics of the economy. Like the idea we have to be able to ‘afford’ urgent social investment. A tiny increase in the tax-to-GDP ratio would erase budget deficits immediately. We’ve been trained not to see…

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

The explosion of talk about mental health. Much of it driven by politicians who want to blame the public for the damage political inaction causes. Social life is imitative. We’re becoming very good at blaming the inside of our own heads…

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

‘Get sick so you won’t get sick’ apparently just makes people sick. All the time, all year. The public is in a controlling relationship now with its governments, who gaslight them and violently abuse them with compulsory infection with…

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.…

A defining feature of political libertarians is the refusal to take personal responsibility for anything, except telling others to take personal responsibility for all the things the political libertarian is paid to do.…

Experts who haven't sold their soul for public and political attention stating the obvious. To stop a pandemic, you have to stop the infections. A pandemic is defined by number of infections. Not hospitalistions. Not economics. INFECTIONS.…

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

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

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

When pirates take over your politics, lots of you will end up walking the plank. https://t.co/iEZdSLE8hl

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

"The only way to generate enough money to both fund the transition to renewable energy and to climate change-proof Australia is to print it." Alan Kohler Well said. One of the glorious cons of the 'Economy' is perpetrated by the financial…

The @theprojecttv segment on whether we’re declaring the pandemic over too soon was a pathetic example of how broken public health is. Serious story, great contribution from @enenbee, then 10 seconds into the discussion it’s terminated…

If the ALP really believes in the stop talking about Covid and it will go away strategy, do the same for the budget. Stop talking about the fucking economy, and it’ll fix itself. Elected politicians are going to kill us. Popularity as a…

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

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

Altman, an avowed republican: “...intrigued by the possibility that constitutional monarchy might be a bulwark against the worst sort of populist authoritarianism.” The last thing we need is Heads of State closer to the populist machine.…

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…

“…modern states are founded on the curious and contradictory principle of “popular sovereignty,” that the power once held by kings still exists, just now displaced onto an entity called “the people.” Populists use the myth of ‘the people’…

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.

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

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

Still pretending a pandemic virus is a seasonal flu virus. People are already staying home when they're sick, but asymptomatic carriers are infecting everybody else at work anyway. Respect would be to stop applying political ideology to a…

In NSW, Covid is not listed in the Public Health Act as a vaccine preventable disease. Which is correct. But it does contradict the political assertion that vaccination has ended the pandemic. https://t.co/hFVh3yLbd7

The ‘bludgers are rorting Covid leave payments’ Albo we saw today was a new low. Less than 3% of claims needed investigating, pretty much par for the course in any scheme. Softening us up to remove it altogether, using a time-honoured…

So does Australian government believe in the WHO or not? Or just Pentecostal raptures? “Still is an acute emergency” in my understanding of English doesn’t mean ‘we’ve moved onto the next phase of the pandemic’. https://t.co/0vWGLkc1gk

Can we stop saying new variants may emerge, and start saying that we’re producing them by not controlling transmission? Just as ‘waves’ of Covid don’t appear magically. We are the waves. And the variants. Every new political capitulation…

A beautiful example of the barren stupidity of libertarian politics. ‘Personal responsibility’ on the roads leads to gridlock. But if every individual driver drives slower via a collective speed limit, everybody drives faster. /1…

NSW has had average speed cameras for years, for heavy vehicles. The government refuses to use them for cars. I suspect more libertarian, populist nonsense about freedom. Nothing energises the libertarian project more than cars.…

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…

Tales from the Covid front lines. 1. RN Breakfast, Jane Halton asked how her review into vaccine procurement is going. Couldn't reveal details, except to give a general sense that we have the '4th lowest death rate' i.e. it seems the…

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

Infection is the invasion of space. Of our most personal space, sometimes called place. Of our workplaces, social places, homes and ultimately our bodies. It’s the most granular level of empire, now called an economy, the push to total…

In the absence of competent non-corrupt government, today's Covid report. Thousands were infected. Probably between 50-100 people died.

That last sentence is the key. 'Australians' are doing all the work, and government will give some (of our) money. So essentially, government is doing nothing. Also ALP, money just for the 'vulnerable' is pure free market politics.…

The ALP here and Democrats in the US are using the same Covid strategy i.e. using the same framings to justify doing nothing. For the same political reason. Conservatives fouled the public health well, they created indifference,…

If we don't want a political solution to a health crisis, don't ask politicians to run a pandemic response. Amazing that their eagerness to do it didn't ring immediate alarm bells at the start of the pandemic. They had no intention of…

Working while sick was already the standard practice in the US before Covid. Many workers have no entitlement to sick leave at all. Pandemics are about politics, not health. https://t.co/fXlrQjCA7N

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.…

Anecdotally Musk’s Starlink has almost brought tears to the eyes of some people in remote Australia. It’s taken a foreign billionaire to deliver modern telecommunications to the bush. Our governments just want tax cuts.…

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

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

Not interested in being drip-fed Covid data by minimising politicians. I'll stick with the cumulative death numbers. Curve still not levelling out. https://t.co/rpRGL9ECQj

The obvious response to the gaslighting of ‘people are tired of Covid’, is to say ‘yep, so governments and business need to take personal responsibility and work a lot harder for us’.

The ‘far Right’ of politics is always just some new populist wannabe offering even more simplistic solutions than the populist idiots they’re replacing. You can call it ‘fascism’ or ‘capitalism’, adult fairy tales. Populism is the problem,…

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.…

A great example of the disconnect between the hot air in daily political discourse and realities out on the ground is renewable energy. I’m not sure many Australians realise the utter phenomenon it already is in Australia. The AEMO stats…

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

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

The default state of society is social conformity. Proust studied it in forensic detail in the Parisian salons. Without regulation, all social activity, including against Covid, will follow the laws of social imitation, conformity.…

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…

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

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

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

Making the denominator zero is consistency. It leads to infinite Covid (for those who skipped maths for a political career). https://t.co/OVhEvHnjxh

Public health as a discipline and practice was invented well before universal voting. It wasn’t a ‘democratic’ invention. It was what we’d now call the top end of town responding to the physical reality of mass disease. Voting (populism)…

Populism is so insidiously successful. If you ask people what democracy is, I bet most will come back with a definition of voting. Populists have seduced people into believing they’re the same thing. But would we elect juries? Of course…

They’ll do it and get away with it, because we have ace political reporters like ‘Shirvo’ on the job to hold them to account. https://t.co/Y9SzDyDVlG

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

My mask is my 'just like leadership' response to 'just like the flu' politicians.

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

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

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

The anger we feel about politicians doing nothing about Covid is the anger the most disadvantaged in society have felt about all politics, for years. Nobody helps them. Now debt is no longer cheap, the illusion of democratic shared power…

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

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

The introduction of germ theory shifted the entire basis of public health away from collective engineering works, and towards individual medicine and pharmacology. That suited political individualism just fine. We’d be much healthier going…

Forcing territorial leaders into a room to create a faux consensus violates nearly all of the principles of federalism (our system). It’s populism destroying federalism. Albo’s dream of being Bob Hawke forgets Hawke didn’t build consensus…

Perrottet jumped straight from public health orders to personal responsibility. The silent partner to the political libertarians throughout the whole pandemic? Business. Do we even know how much business has invested in Covid mitigations?…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I won’t be going to the work Christmas party during a pandemic. They asked why. I said ‘I don’t want to give my family Covid for Christmas’. Blank looks. WHS is almost non-existent for Covid in many (most?) workplaces.

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.…

Tell me again why electing leaders is good for democracy. All they do is come between work that needs doing, and the money to do that work, re-routing it for ideological and career reasons. https://t.co/ixrWqG5COs

Go after the core beliefs. Everything else is window dressing. Societies don’t get in the way of individual freedom, they make individualism possible. It’s not two things, it’s one thing. The same political beliefs prevent us fighting…

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

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

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

One climate minimising strategy is to say renewable technologies need a lot more rare earth metals (they do), so they're unrealistic. This is Australian extraction of rare earths in tonnes. Ignoring populist hot air for a decade.…

Every political leader and expert comfortable with how things are going with Covid should be made to explain how 25,000 dead in a year is justifiable. (Easy question for the lazy political journos out there to use.) And 500K+ ongoing…

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

"We'll follow the health advice so long as government pays"

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

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

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

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

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

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

The patient in public health is the public. The population, the body politic. Talk of mild and severe disease is imported from medicine, to describe individuals. More N=1 political framing. A public riddled with ‘mild’ Covid with pockets…

‘Natural’ infection is political speak for poor hygiene. Filthy air and water, mostly.

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

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

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

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

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…

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

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

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

I’m amused how world leaders lecture Putin and China on a ‘rules-based order’, and then at home ditch all the Covid rules and replace them with individual freedom to do what you like.

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…

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

Friends and colleagues often discuss now how ‘these vaccines don’t work, do they?’ Because they were promised they’d end the pandemic. And they didn’t. The anti-vax movement is having a recruiting bonanza. Public health vandalism by…

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

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

Another vital story our political gossip columnists (journalists) don’t write about is how the entire world economy would collapse without the ‘authoritarian’ Chinese Covid measures. It’s doing all of the heavy lifting we refuse to do.…

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

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…

Hey Hamish, what's 'diminishing the value' of sharing a workplace is catching Covid there because employers,government and unions ignore WHS, and potentially taking years off your life. Plus hours of commuting with astronomical petrol…

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

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

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

⁦@EdConwaySky⁩ graphic here showing the real politics of our time. Engineering has always been the key to lasting civilisation, as the Romans knew as well. It actually creates long-term social stability. And the US is one of the better…

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

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

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

On de-platforming, it’s what Twitter did to Trump. He’s been desperate to get back, his alternative social media network is a joke. The key to beating bad people is to understand they’re a tiny minority who don’t survive refused access to…

The power of Australian politics is the community. Not the same thing as ‘the people’, or socialism, or capitalism, or any of those European imported categories. Australian life has always had a community focus. It’s quite rare, it’s…

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

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

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

As Saul Griffith says, the cheapest energy in the world is Australian rooftop solar. There’s a lesson in that. While elected ideologues dithered, the Australian community started solving the energy problem without them. The community is…

There may be a mask there, somewhere. It gives a fair indication of no change to Covid strategy if they win i.e. they’ll do nothing. Vote independent, the parties are well past their use-by date. Refocus Oz politics back on community…

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…

This is the deep psychology that makes me reject all the popular ideas of democracy as the ‘sovereignty of the people’. The people is not some social actor with intent and purpose. Groups are always led, by a small number of people. About…

Great piece foregrounding the real elephant in the democratic room. Institutions. Under assault by N=1 politics for decades. Without them we’re like a planet without an atmosphere. It’s unsurvivable. https://t.co/amkiUcwJDZ

Covid accelerated all of the ways existing economic politics was already broken. Plagues and wars are all that have ever really fundamentally changed societies. Thus the desperate and laughable attempt to now pretend Covid is over. Reality…

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

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…

I'm confused. As government oppression was scaled back, people died in huge numbers. /s https://t.co/RCLSWIpNLR

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some good stuff mixed with some empirically disprovable assertion, for example on schools. We need a Royal Commission, with TOR on public health and what it means in 2022. Politicians should never again run an emergency response.…

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…

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

To understand how conservative politicians capture the vote of poorer people, imagine you're somebody who has no success with relationships. Nobody wants you. Would you rather: 1) be told you're a loser, but it's not your fault. Or, 2) be…

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

Power IS a soap opera. That’s what populism means. https://t.co/a6c4Z8C3IX

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’.…

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

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

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

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…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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…

Derren Brown here demonstrating in a simple way the default state of society, when regulation and government are removed. Why political libertarians get to control everything, while saying they’re giving us all freedom.…

You get a sense here of how National Cabinet has possibly destroyed the Australian public health system. Political expediency to win votes turned one of the strongest public health nations in the world into an anti-vax breeding ground.…

Eventually the analysis reaches the obvious conclusion that monetarism has always been a politics favouring people with money. Go figure. Economic mumbo jumbo is designed to hide basic facts like this. https://t.co/u28tsV1dNy

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

Do they still have a budget lock-up? Where all the top journalists and politicians breathe each other's air for the entire day leading up to the budget presentation? #auspol

One of the first things despots do is tear up laws and replace them with a handful of diktats from themselves. Given that, the achievement of N=1 politics to make people believe regulation = oppression is quite something. The worst kind of…

The populist’s method is to turn even tiny issues into debating point hysteria, to energise apathetic voters, particularly from the other side. Tabloidism. You can notice the relative calm when they get voted out, like right now.

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

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

It's very modern N=1 politics that a government can be applauded for 'budget repair', but not people repair. Accountants took over the world and we hardly blinked. https://t.co/q4wNDrWzDX

Privatised telecommunications, now privatised health insurance. Getting government out of peoples' lives lets the hackers into them. #auspol https://t.co/O28Y1qCf4p

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…

Even ‘mild’ Covid increases risk of death up to 10 times in this study. And nothing will be done because government has been hacked by populists. A vacuum of leadership means the crowd reverts to the social conformity of ‘what everybody…

Institutions are what hold societies together. The people who destroy them replace them with slogans. ‘The economy’, ‘living with the virus’, ‘the politics of envy’, etc. etc. Sloganism is populism. Most peoples’ understanding of public…

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

The judge (institutions) instructed jurors on 17 occasions not to 'do their own research' (populism). Guess who won. https://t.co/cuBIHuWE0a

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…

Listening to the usual banalities about energy on #insiders, a gossip column for the elected populist dimwits. Here’s the disconnect between the Australian community (heart of our democracy), and the elected dimwits. From AEMO. There is so…

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

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

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

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

NSW was the advance guard in destroying Australia's then public health strategy, which was working brilliantly. This was all about politics, and keeping the NSW cabinet unified. Just as federally the LNP sabotaged climate action to create…

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

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

We now know you can’t vote your way out of a pandemic. Just as we haven’t been able to vote our way out of climate change. Voting serves only politicians, not societies. If you have to try to make something popular to get it done, nothing…

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

I'm sure the US and allies want to defend Taiwan because they like them. But I'm also sure the fact they make most of the world's semiconductors is right at the top of their list of concerns. As @EdConwaySky is saying, look at the material…

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…

As with the shift to independents in politics, I'm less convinced this is people getting smarter. And more the ongoing collapse of all shared, public spaces/events. https://t.co/MONquxv83r

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

The more followers a person has on social media, the less likely they are to be able to engage in conversation with them. These platforms show the fallacy they promote, that democracy functions by wide discussion among ‘the people’.…

Premiers, Prime Ministers and CHOs who declare this the 'next phase of the pandemic' need to explain what else that means apart from 'the phase where thousands of people die'. https://t.co/akdzqwS2Dk

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…

Ah the modern LNP. Getting the government out of (rich peoples') lives. https://t.co/KGtWQylMB2

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

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

How many years did politics deny climate change? It’s surprising that we’ve been so amazed that the same politicians decided to ignore Covid. And that we didn’t notice them encouraging debates over ‘the science’, in the same way. To stall…

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

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

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

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…

The idea that countries implement a ‘system of government’, like democracy or socialism, to me attributes amusing levels of coordination to human groups that simply doesn’t exist. All countries are a mixture of all sorts of things. There…

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

Politicians who say they 'follow the science' frame the terms of reference well before any work is done. That way they only hear what they've already decided they want to hear. National Cabinet has been doing this for the entire pandemic.…

We need to learn from decades of strategic stalling on climate change, by arguing ‘the science’. I don’t even argue the science of Covid, it’s so patently obvious that infecting everybody repeatedly with a pathogenic virus is idiotic.…

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

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

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…

Because we listened to busybody, politically-motivated health experts about what to do in schools and not to people in schools themselves, this is where we’ve ended up. https://t.co/ibk9kt7vjs

You won’t find a clearer example of society being replaced with an economy, than the determination of central bankers and politicians to inflict financial armageddon on average people to tame inflation, but total casual indifference to…

Astounding really, that the government's own health people can say this, and the government response remains...do nothing. One to file away for the Royal Commission. #auspol #COVID19Aus https://t.co/dpu6N8fR8o

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

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

You have to pinch yourself sometimes, that so many of the public have been made to feel like they’re doing something powerful by surrendering to repeated infection by a pandemic virus. Political spin is extraordinary to watch in action.…

We don’t ask enough what sort of person looks at life, and decides the most oppressive thing about it is government regulation. It’s a simple one though - rich people. Most regulation is to protect people who aren’t rich.…

You can’t have public health policy if you have political libertarian governments who don’t believe the public is even a thing. https://t.co/tUHVadWRR3

The complex problems we face are untouched by popularity-based politics. We CANNOT elect our way out of them. The problems are independent of ideology. Even basics like local roads. Social media is accelerating the disconnect between these…

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

We've got the tools. Now we need the leadership. What's the point of electing a government if it then just flick-passes its responsibilities back at the electors? https://t.co/Z0dFgzdFBG

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

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

Some Covid minimisers and politicians say we'll need to cycle through waves of Covid for another decade. Many industries are already on the brink of collapse. Ideology doesn't heal the sick, care/teach children, or keep food in…

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

Across the world politicians and business leaders spoke often of the need to ‘balance’ action against Covid with economic activity. Now action against Covid has been removed, leaving only economic activity. No surprise, it’s the climate…

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

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

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

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

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

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

“We led the country, we were the ones that were taking everybody from overseas for WA because they locked their borders, for Queensland, for Victoria, we struck the balance all the way through, our economy as a result here in NSW is…

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 a regulator. A gas regulator. It regulates the flow of gas so you don’t incinerate your family and house when cooking a bbq. That’s what regulation means, to apportion, to enable. Politicians who remove regulations, like mandates,…

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

The people whose politics is heavily about the ‘rule of law’ will at the same time describe Covid laws as authoritarian oppression. They’re bad faith actors, their freedom is literally their freedom, from laws they don’t like. Not from law…

We took so many of our Covid leads from the UK and US, and not from the region that we actually live in. It’s not just nuclear subs which betray the real project of modern conservative politics, the rearguard Judeo-Christian culture war.…

Trump already at 60 million followers again, on Twitter. He's not using it yet, but that honeypot of dumb love will be irresistible to him. Leaving here will do not one thing to halt those tens of millions.

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…

The entire idiot edifice of economic politics is floundering, without a clue what to do except inflict more suffering upon the people who can afford it the least. When pushed to its limits, any system shows you its real underlying…

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

I see the RBA, business and politicians are concerned about a possible 'wage-price spiral'. Unlike the multiple profit-price spirals of the past 30 years that left them all completely unmoved, because those are 'the economy'.

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…

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

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

People tend to obey their leaders. For all of 2022, health experts have told people to wear masks. Politicians have told them not to bother. Who do the people follow? Not the health experts. Political libertarians know this. Their…

Working Dog nailed this, years ahead of its time in Australia. Institutional expertise meets vacuous populist politics. It was hilarious, now it’s scarily our lives. https://t.co/PWOQYhb8s6

Phew, we’ve avoided having to redistribute wealth. Just as we avoided changing society because of Covid, and just infected everybody instead. The economy, the greatest political trick to protect the status quo of all time.…

Politics today isn't a contest of two equally balanced sides. One side has all the power. It invents its own opponents by creating a fake strawman reality that it can manipulate, designed to enrage a particular demographic. Which it plays…

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

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

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

When you believe individuals and groups are two separate things, you never escape this yo-yo. In business or politics. https://t.co/b1y5PioZfA

Politicians lie. And yet given the choice between a politician’s and a medical professional’s advice on a mask, most choose the politician. Especially those who yell for freedom from politicians. Social conformity is the key to…

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

The party who won’t do anything about Covid beat the party who definitely won’t do anything about Covid, with a party who won’t do anything about Covid coming in 3rd. Independents who won’t do anything about Covid came last. You can’t…

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

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

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

A shout out to all Australians about the #VigilAgainstCOVID today. People taking on personal responsibility for the public health action governments of Australia are not taking. @AlboMP

Can we regulate media and social media please? Ignore the gibbering free speech idiots, all of our other democratic freedoms are regulated. It’s the regulation that creates the freedom, without it the wealthy and powerful do as they like.…

The freest we’ve ever been individually, in that libertarian way which now dominates politics, was under ‘lockdowns’. We were allowed to stay home, for weeks or even months. What we call neoliberalism is just re-marketing work as freedom,…

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

Covid made visible the total absence of care for ordinary people that was already built into our politics. Personal debt has hidden that contempt for decades, creating an illusion of community. The last sop is token concern for the…

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

Steve Jobs took on the free market libertarianism of the IT industry and called it for the joke it is. It made Apple the biggest company in the world. Musk has collided with Jobs’ legacy. He’s toast. Our politics is embedded in these…

The politicians who demanded societies ‘re-open’ in the pandemic, spent the previous 30 years demanding we ‘maintain control of our borders’ i.e. keep society as closed as possible. Except for recreational and business travel, and…

Local drive-through PCR clinic was apparently playing Christmas Carols this morning. Fantastic facility, well-ventilated, super quick. Governments closing these down so you can spend $10 per RAT to test 6 times to try to detect infection.…

In the interests of good public messaging, do we have a list somewhere of how many infections all of our senior advisers and politicians have had, that encourage 'rich hybrid immunity'? @YouAreLobbyLud this sounds like an initiative for…

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

The clear libertarian Trojan Horse that social media has been. That set of political beliefs frames the technology itself. It embodies a US-style libertarian outlook, in its idea ‘the people’ generate society. They don’t, the collision…

One of my areas of expertise is political strategy. We’re losing against Covid for the same reason we lost against climate change. We’re mistaking politics for a scientific debate. That debate is a fiction, minimisers only use it to…

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

Nothing will be done against Covid. Nothing can be allowed to interrupt the inexorable march of the economy. COP27 proved that too, with climate change. The ‘economy’ is a fiction created by economists and politicians to protect the status…

The ridiculous claims about lockdown are not accidental. Those in charge know children now dying is political dynamite, so the propaganda is immediately rolled out to knee-cap any momentum building around it in the wrong direction.…

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

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

Can we get rid of billions of taxpayer subsidies to a hopelessly inefficient industry, private health insurance? If politicians want market-based public services, let them live by the market. Private health insurance never worked.…

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

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

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

So many stories of people so sick, churning through RATs at $10 a pop to try to get to the bottom of it. I'll never forgive Australian governments for not only releasing a pandemic virus into the community, but then also making them pay…

Most of the serious problems confronting our societies have known solutions. The real problem societies have is that all of these solutions have to cut their way through a jungle of grinning populist elected leaders to happen. Name me one…

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

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

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

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

Weak political leadership, exactly. And absolutely pissweak political journalism holding it to account for this public health disgrace. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/jxfuFUmpPK

We have to regulate our way out of the pandemic. When we wanted to lower the risk from guns, we regulated. Only law can capture all domains of society at the same time. The same politicians who told us removing Covid law creates freedom…

1) Why do these tougher questions have to come from the public? What are journalists paid for? ‘A lot of people have said’ would be a fail in a first-year journalism assignment. 2) I never agreed to any ‘deal’. Consumer law has stricter…

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

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

There are only two ways to meaningfully control energy prices. One is to make it a public resource again and regulate it. Politicians won’t even regulate against a virus, so no to that. The other is generate it yourself. Can’t see this…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.…

Most defenders of democracy defend the wrong things, because their experience of actually running one is zero. Nothing but idealistic fairy tales. They should be required to spend a day on the switchboard of their local council. They would…

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

The RBA’s report into consumption during the pandemic is a very revealing insight into modern Australia. This is how a spoiled, snowflake society responds to an emergency. It missed its cafes, restaurants and recreational travel too much.…

So many watched the show. What about this scene for example suggests that elected politicians should run a country? https://t.co/uRvCjaTaIB

Our peaceful, prosperous lives of the past 70 years weren’t the result of our democratic freedoms. It was the massive post-war boom, where war industries built consumer goods. Those markets are long saturated. Stagnant wages, minimal job…

Note that he’ll be isolating for 10 days. I doubt that’s a coincidence. 5 days and then zero days were always political measures, not health. #auspol https://t.co/5oV1gWHHyM

RN breakfast this morning, a panel predicting ‘Chinese propaganda’ would say Zero Covid was a great platform to open up China from. That’s what our government said here too. Interesting that it’s ‘propaganda’ when the Chinese say it.

‘Protecting the vulnerable’ is neoliberal safety net democracy. No democracy, just a market, and you have some minimal public assistance as a safety net for those who fall through the market’s cracks. A LABOR government is doing this.…

We should always be worried when leaders get very chummy. Populism claims this is ‘team Australia’, but our Westminster federalist system is built on contestation. Without contestation it collapses, it ceases to work. As we’re seeing with…

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.…

From the AIER. Sponsor of the ‘protecting the vulnerable’ Covid policy adopted by the Australian Labor government. If you lie down with dogs you’ll get up with fleas. They do know they’re being played by the extreme Right of politics,…

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…

Insurance for avoidable disasters is like infection for immunity. It’s a symptom of none of the risk mitigation being done properly or at all. Watch the pile-on on the insurance industry for problems caused by populist politicians doing…

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

‘Unelected’ has become an insult under populism. Do you elect your dentist, car mechanic, or airline pilot that flys you to your holiday destination? Or are they in their jobs because of a tested competence? What’s the test of running a…

The genius of the libertarian wrecking ball is that it creates extreme distrust in government and institutions. And that’s exactly what they want. For us to throw all civil society away, and return to the Wild West. Which incidentally 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…

The reason lockdowns became so potent politically is that the default state now is to be away from home. For work, for socialising, for travel. Like our homes are saucepans, and lockdowns sealed them up so that they were ready to blow.…

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…

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

AEMO’s graph. Look at that tsunami of rooftop solar. By 2025 already, so much that it will threaten the stability of the grid. Exports throttled already to prevent overload, at a time existing energy companies say ‘supply’ is the issue. 2…

Often forgotten is that social media was designed to implement a set of libertarian political beliefs i.e. that interaction of ‘the people’ is democracy. But the people is not even a thing. It’s just a group of people, each acting in their…

The NBN was rolled out using a libertarian political market model, where people in remote and regional areas became broadband ‘vulnerables’. Rather than, as we did for telephones, rolling out the same top-shelf model to an undifferentiated…

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,…

The Tories frantically upping the propaganda in the UK, with the mass strikes. The gall of this one, the party who deliberately let Covid rip, killing over 200,000 Britons. And still climbing. https://t.co/LfwWlaNSnu

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.…

Democracy as ‘the people’ running things now means celebrity dating experts running public health responses. https://t.co/chNhkLEgiu

Probably should have copied Covid into the ‘peaking before Christmas’ email. Politicians too gutless to front up with this message, which means many won’t even be aware of it and will slaughter members of family. https://t.co/cOX2CYjvVu

Perversely, it’s neoliberal/libertarian politics which laid the foundations for social media, by gutting communities and social groupings more generally. Then they monetised the desire for community, offering what people had lost, but for…

Let me reference myself here (sorry), and point out that libertarian politicians WANT us to blame each other for this farce. When the blame is entirely theirs. https://t.co/up8mpWSIUf

Herd immunity is the market-based mechanism to attempt to deal with infectious disease. Not an analogy, this is the political epidemiology of Covid. Public health is intrinsically political.

There’s no public health effort against Covid, because our politics has no public. Res publica - also ‘common-wealth’ - means something held in common by people. Replaced by a global market, which allows no collective component. Europe at…

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

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…

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

To clarify, this isn’t an argument to make the 95% like the 5%. That’s the myth of ‘the people’ running democracy. They never have, and never will. Everybody leading everybody means nobody leading anybody. It’s about how you select the 5%.…

Infection is the empirical proof of the bankruptcy of libertarian political ideas.

Leaders are pushing on with even more suppression of Covid data. It’s time for the non-elected officials who oversee that data to draw a line in the sand. Part of your position description is to hold the elected and their populist…

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’.…

Most people happily wear masks when political leaders mandate them. Despite all the freedom rhetoric, people mostly do as they’re told. People are not wearing masks now because the same leaders have told them not to bother. It’s not…

When I hear ALP politicians talk about the ‘end of Covid exceptionalism’, I know they’re repeating what their new pal Dom has told them. Progressive politicians have a political oedipus complex, where they secretly want approval from the…

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…

This is a great initiative, because this pandemic is really about political persuasion and outright propaganda much more than it’s about public health. It’s therapeutic adding your favourite spin to the list. https://t.co/LRDRLtqYmr

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…

All public health involves a politics. Using the immune system to try to defeat a pandemic is the free market version of public health. Not an analogy, it shifts all public health action to the individual. Which is an oxymoron, because it…

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

I 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…

Political libertarians want us to use human immunity to beat the pandemic. It’s like saying the only thing we need to defeat crime is giving everybody a gun. Not coincidentally, they tend to say that as well.

If you’re wondering why business and politicians they’ve bought don’t care about you getting repeated infections with a lethal virus, it’s because you’re little better than cattle to them. https://t.co/LNCkpI23Te

You can’t argue to do or not do things, just because ‘the public won’t support it’. The public changes its mind all the time. It’s why corporations and politicians spend billions on marketing and spin. You can market anything, including…

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…

If you have to choose between a government locking you down, or a virus doing it (like right now), choose government every time. Government is us, we vote for them, we can even run for government. Viruses kill, they don’t care who or how…

The ‘focused protection’ of ‘the vulnerable’ that most governments sing now from the GBD hymn sheet. Has anybody seen any protection of even obviously vulnerable people happening? They’re still dying in large numbers.

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

The why is simple. Because they want to not act on the data and modelling. Also James McCaw’s comment, that support for measures was very strong. Politicians want us to believe we’re all ready to overthrow government if they tell us to put…

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

Preppers have always seems a sad symptom of a dysfunctional society. But the more N=1 politics wins, the more we may all need to incorporate greater self-sufficiency into our lives. Nobody is looking out for you. https://t.co/8XOBkHypKC

See how emergency management is supposed to work? It’s not ‘National Cabinet preparing for bushfire threat’, it’s the RFS. Experts. The only role of politicians in emergencies is to build public support for what experts say needs doing.…

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

The ongoing slaughter of Baby Boomers with Covid is more proof that in electoral fundamentalist societies (what we call democracies), popularity/votes determine everything. Boomers have lost their clout. https://t.co/QTQRKYNgZd

Our government is advised by some health professionals inside the tent and out that this is public health best practice. I know minimisers, sometimes even health professionals, take Tweets like these and mock them. Can they explain to us…

Two major democracies now victims of insurrections in only a few years. Populism, fuelled by social media, did this. Populists can make anything popular, and call it ‘the will of the people’. It’s Marketing 101. Democracy can’t survive if…

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

Hybrid immunity spin is being ramped up in Australia right now. Some people have had Covid 5 times in 2 years. Time to call enough, and particularly from health professionals campaigning under this same banner. You expect idiot politicians…

From late-2021. You don’t base public policy in an emergency on expert hunches. You use risk management, which factors in the full range of possible outcomes. Politicians are shopping for expert opinions to match their pre-determined…

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

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

Political donations only exist because politicians have way too much delegated power. Scale that back to what it should be - a public touchpoint for decisions, and not the maker of decisions - and the donations go away by themselves. Reel…

Sir Humphrey would be proud. Damn patients, obstructing the smooth working of hospitals. Will we ever know the full story of how many patients here were farmed out to varieties of out of hospital care to keep government hospitalisation…

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…

The showdown continues in the UK over decades of libertarian democratic vandalism. Are our unions watching? https://t.co/MpHZAeHU73

Dressing in a Nazi uniform disqualifies a person from office. Well over 5000 people have died under the same politician’s let it rip Covid policy, in NSW. I feel that kinda already disqualified him from office.

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

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

Out of the White House. It doesn’t matter what people prefer, some basic things need to happen to allow society to function at all. Popularly-elected politicians will rarely focus on these basic operational things. But they ultimately…

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

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

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

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

As far as I know and according to the NSW legislation site, the attempt by the NSW Government to repeal the Covid provisions in the Workers Compensation Act still hasn’t been passed. Surprised this hasn’t been more reported.…

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

Don’t be surprised that the same politicians whose ‘balanced’ Covid approach meant dropping all Covid action and returning to 100% economic action, also aren’t even bothering to ensure vax, in a vax-only approach. https://t.co/YhOQ4coTc6

A government regulation restricting our movements to protect the community from a virus, and the same virus restricting our movements. The difference? You get a say on the regulations. And everybody carries the load.

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

Not picking on Andrew. But this is the shift that libertarians brought to democracy, which is destroying it. The calculation of majorities and minorities, instead of a single public. https://t.co/1k3O3hs6Pu

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…

I champion actuarial analysis of Covid because it does the thing politicians say they do, but don’t. It ‘balances’ Covid against the economy. It assesses that linkage.

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

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…

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

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

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.…

That the majority won’t vote for it doesn’t mean diddly squat for action on Covid, or anything. The role of government is to do work that needs doing. If that’s unpopular work, its role is to make it popular.

When you look at the review the AIER did of the GBD, you’ll notice the absence of the virus. The only brief of the group was to remove lockdowns. To this day minimisers see the pandemic only as a problem of lockdowns. Infection and…

Perfect example of how popularity-based politics is eventually supplanted by reality-based politics. We wasted several decades routing what needed doing through the ridiculous team sports of popularity politics. It didn’t add one useful…

I’d be very surprised if there are many traffic engineers whose politics lean libertarian. https://t.co/f1IlVCa5XE

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

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

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

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

Until we unpack ‘the economy’, and see it as political strategy rather than as a physical reality, nothing will change. Economic things happen, transactions. But ‘the economy’ suggests an entity or agency that contains all of these…

I wouldn’t immediately assume that political libertarians accidentally break the law. It plays very well with their base. https://t.co/WLIlVZMleb

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…

Ultimately social media drove Ardern from office, and gave libertarians from the US in particular a foothold in the NZ door. Also how they mad inroads here. Just one more swing of the wrecking ball these platforms are, for all democracies.…

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

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

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

The regulator overwhelmed by the sewer. And this is just kids. Social media operates in direct opposition to the basic operational realities of democracy. https://t.co/39MfoJXQrL

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

Damien is bureau chief for the NYT in Oz. He sees Australia better than most Australians. The community-based politics he discovered here has been under assault by the LNP trying to graft US and UK-style libertarianism onto Oz life. Our…

Robodebt takes you straight to the heart of libertarian political belief. The fundamentalist obsession with removing the State from peoples’ lives. People created the State. It’s us, all of us. Unlike the privatised enclaves libertarians…

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

They update flu shots every year. Australia’s boosters to date are for older variants of Covid. There’s no talk at all of any new vaccine for 2023 either, globally. This is the ‘balance’ economic politicians talk about. 100% economy, 0%…

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

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

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

Referring to this again, why has fighting a pandemic with an economy led to mass infection, disease and death? We can see it here, just one more step towards stripping way every last public health protection. Now, even vaccines. The answer…

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

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…

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

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,…

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

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…

Insurance premiums price the relative weighting of individual and collective risk. Governments who don’t believe in the collective or ‘public’ at all create astronomical insurance premiums, by refusing to do any of the public work to…

Unions are giving it a red hot go in the UK, to challenge 50 years of the stripping away of public-everything. ‘There is no such thing as society’ politics leaves you with no society. Why did it take 50 years for some to realise this.…

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…

It’s a measure of the general ignorance of how our democracy is structured that National Cabinet is not widely seen as against the most fundamental principles of our federalism.

The one hope I see for turning around the deliberate destruction of the public as an idea and practice since the 1970s, is engineering. The socio-technical complexity of the modern world. The Romans hold the key. The longest and greatest…

@Globalbiosec has been saying for a long time this disease will always be epidemic, never endemic. Instead government listens to experts whose focus is curating growing social media followings, for fame and profit. https://t.co/dGTbatIbF9

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…

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

After 30 years of anti-renewables politics, the Oz community has built so much rooftop solar capacity, it’s overwhelmed the grid’s capacity to distribute it. (AEMO graphic.) Oz politics functions via community, not by Left, Right,…

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

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

@AlanKohler absolutely nailing the true politics we’ve lived. A theology of small government, to hell with society. 50 years in the making, as I Tweet about a lot. https://t.co/PZ14LARdcW

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…

Easy to blame the institution here, as we do for ATAGI too. The root cause in both cases is total inaction from government, throwing everything onto the institution to manage alone. Libertarians invented monetarism AND ‘live with the…

The great success of populism isn’t to convince millions of people to believe crazy things. It’s to make them believe they should have opinions about those things, where before they’d never even heard of them.

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,…

The most honest assessment from a politician I’ve seen in some time. Though a a cautionary tale to all expert advisers to government, notice the first thing the Minister does is throw the advice under a bus, blaming it for the short and…

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…

Alan Tudge in his announcement today about leaving politics called the economy the ‘foundation’ of societies. Rubbish. Government is the foundation of all modern societies. You can find nations with minimal economic activity. But you won’t…

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…

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

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

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

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

This is what N=1 populism has done. Public administration has never been you and me having hypotheses, then ‘following the science’. It’s been you and me having no idea how any of this works, going about our own busy lives, and letting…

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…

Why economic politics does nothing about continuous epidemic waves. That’s what the economy is, an exponential growth function. It sees no issues with continuous waves of destruction. Bipolar politics. https://t.co/bFtDmZ83tH

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

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

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

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

In astronomy large telescopes allow us to peer backwards in time. In politics without constant vigilance, the past always rushes to join us right here and now. https://t.co/n6Je6aIE4t

I still haven’t found a single definition of a pandemic that isn’t based on number and/or extent of infection. Not hospitalisation, severe disease or death. Why are politicians and their enablers being allowed to simply define a pandemic…

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

Statistics was invented by States (it’s in the name) to try to manage collective problems. But 50 years of anti-State politics has removed even the will to use them. Why they’re not only doing nothing about Covid, but actively shutting…

Have you noticed that nothing that is collectively important to the survival of society is permitted by the economy? That’s not an accident. It’s a strategic political tool invented by the politics of ‘there is no such thing as society’,…

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

Politicians in electoral democracies only have 3 skills. Positioning themselves within the hierarchy of their party, managing the demands of their donors, and whipping up popularity. None of that translates to achieving a single thing for…

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…

Ask politicians why they can’t do more to stop Covid, or to fix the cost of living, and you’ll get the same answer. ‘The economy’. Some people don’t believe the economy is a fiction. But you can define it precisely by all the things it…

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…

Journalists wrote about Covid when politicians disagreed about it. That gossip is all political journalism now is. 20,000 Australians died because of Covid last year, but because all politicians cheered that on, there was no story.…

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…

Democracy is buckling under the weight of damage slogans do. https://t.co/7F6XpS35JE

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…

In the blue corner we have the actuary. In the red we have the economist and economic politician. Actuary wins with a knock out seconds into Round 1. The economy is a political myth, designed to bypass democracy. Until we fix that, nothing…

Time is on the ‘let’s just define our problems away’ bandwagon. If an ‘agnostic evaluation’ of the science suggests living with a pandemic, it supports what I’ve said, that it isn’t a scientific problem to solve. Scientists can’t fix…

I have less trouble seeing sentience in computer code and animals than I do finding it in modern economic politics. https://t.co/5DHkwHmWs0

We can’t do even a basic thing like stopping the rich pillaging super as a form of tax evasion. Because? Always the same reason, it might lose votes. Isn’t voting grand? Democracy’s greatest obstacle. Doesn’t achieve a single thing.

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

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

From 22 minutes on, the brains trust over at the Guardian. Firstly not even aware we’re into year 4 of the pandemic. Then all sagely concluding the community ‘won’t support’ further Covid measures, regurgitating a LNP talking point as…

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

Sport is always sold as a health thing. But the much more important thing community sport does is train Australian democracy. In some countries, it doesn’t even exist as an activity. It’s where we learn many of our community-building…

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

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

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

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…

As a leader, admitting vaccines don’t stop transmission in the workforce gives you two options. Stop requiring them, or ramp up other workforce protections. No prizes for guessing which option the NSW Government chose.…

Shaping up to possible minority government in NSW. Which may be a good thing, neither major party intends to do a thing about Covid. https://t.co/ImEYlKDkbT

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

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

Australian politics is communitarian (look it up). Not capitalist, socialist, Left or Right. All through the climate war decades, Australians ignored the BS and went about installing an entire new national electricity generation system…

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

50 years of ‘there is no such thing as society’ politics is producing (wait for it, you won’t guess) - no society. We left it far too late to try to reverse the same sort of disastrous social collapse we’re seeing in the UK, US and now…

The super fight shows two things. 1) How even the most basic common sense measures are stymied by electoral popularity politics. 2) That status drives societies. Aspiration. That this decision isn’t immediately hugely popular shows that.…

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…

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

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

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

Great piece showing the power of talking about the specific, rather than generalising in stats. The lethal stupidity of government-sponsored dining vouchers in the middle of a pandemic, and the tragedy they helped produce.…

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…

“But the premier's press conferences have become a bit like that — no matter what is asked, the economy is the answer.” You won’t find a clearer empirical proof that ‘the economy’ was invented to bypass all social and political issues.…

One of my favourite pages to refer vax-and-forget people to is the list of control guidelines for infectious diseases, in NSW. Many members of the public are not aware these controls even exist, or that they’re applied 365 days of the…

‘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…

Politicians treat vaccines as medicines. Others treat immunity as a dialectic between pathogen and human/vaccine. But infection is an ecosystem. All public health measures, including vaccines, work long-term only if they can create an…

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

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…

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…

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

The UK government is in electoral trouble. So it’s using the Australian way, to drum up votes. They all swap strategies, we’re using their let it rip Covid strategy. (They literally do swap strategies, often they hire the same…

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…

A notable feature of modern conservative politics is that it has no real policy agenda at all. Just this one, the stripping away of the infrastructure of everything ‘public’. Like I often say, it’s the new/old feudalism. You can’t unsee…

Great piece⁩. My two cents, much of the resistance to further action is from the anti-government crowd. And from pollies worried about cost. But much (most?) of what needs doing is basic WHS. That’s already legally required, it’s not new.…

This graph tells a very different story, depending on how you frame it. Right now we’re so habituated to modern economic political framings that we tend to see it as a graph about welfare. About government ‘aid’. But reframe it and you’ll…

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…

The astonishment that society won’t fight a pandemic is maybe a deeper pain. The disappearance of purpose from lives, except you do you. Party, drink, travel, curate your online persona. The hollowing out of civilisation. Who could care…

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

Fawning, embarrassing. Like teenagers meeting Harry Styles. Imagine Keating looking like this? Never. Even Biden looks a bit embarrassed. The LNP were even worse. And it’s the same with corporate leaders, like Gates. This is what selecting…

It’s not the planet, Earth, that contains the only known life in the universe. It’s the atmosphere, itself created by living things. That tiny, thin blue line. Unique in our known universe. Sustains us, shields us from asteroids and…

The populist pygmies who lead us today, compared to these giants from our own lifetimes. The LNP must not believe its luck, having the modern ALP falling over itself to implement LNP policy. https://t.co/vU0jXuFg92

Another way the economy crowd hijacked politics and societies, is to turn budget nights into some sort of sacred ritual. Look through your family album and see if you can find any shots of ‘mum and dad putting together the family budget’.…

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…

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

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

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

There is still hope in the Press Gallery. One still dares to play the ideas, not team sports. Most of them little more than gossip columnists for their far too cosy relationship with politicians. https://t.co/SEmHY050l4

It’s worth unpacking just how ridiculous the idea of the ‘market’ is. Both of these sets of people occupy the same global ‘market’. By current economic politics, it means they both compete equally. The whole thing is such an obvious con, a…

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…

Still amazes me that we’ve gone 70 years not even noticing that the idea of a market economy is almost the exact opposite of the idea of democracy. https://t.co/aZwPILHPCW

Reality-based politics. Elected numpties and defence hawks hypothesising war with the country who builds pretty much everything we use, and supplies the raw materials for nearly everything else. https://t.co/8P1q7lqaJa

The path to saving societies won’t be through the idiot team sports of Left and Right, or the identity politics of using social collapse as a platform to express our individual grievances. It will be through rapid engineering works. We…

The Block, and the surge in interest in luxury. I’ve argued that what we call an economy is really a trick, the replacement of the public sphere with a fictitious market of free-floating individuals, interacting. Driven by a sophisticated…

We’re at least 30 years too late. Governments won’t fight Covid for the same reason they won’t fight climate change. The transformation of societies into economies, complete decades ago. We missed it. No amount of health data has even 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…

You can't unsee it. An economy, plus 'experience and energy'. That's it. Amazed he called it a 'state', I guess that's a dismantling still in progress. Though not capitalised, so he probably meant the state of being the elected government.…

Friend at a local government conference says there was unanimity as to the greatest barrier to good governance. The elected body. The same for every level of government. The world is far too complex and technical now for popularity to be…

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

Americans, like the rest of the world and despite all the libertarian rhetoric, follow their leaders. Politicians said the pandemic was over. Most scientists didn’t. The public followed their leaders. https://t.co/xB06AQ2wyl

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

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.

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

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

One of Greg Jericho’s charts. Those in the business and political communities who will argue against a 4-day week, saying it must be tied to productivity, have happily ignored the decoupling of productivity of workers from their benefits,…

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

Climate change shows how our current way of running democracy will lead to our extinction. The action needed in the next 5-10 years won’t happen, if we retain a politics based on the team sports of placating human interests. Only a…

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

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

The problem with ‘polarisation’ as a concept is that it’s the basis of our democracies. Government and opposition. Prosecution and defence. Contestation breaks through social conformity. Murdoch is damaging because he isn’t counterbalanced…

Another modern disguise the economy employs, labour hire. Old slavery, in modern drag. Unsurprisingly massively accelerated under the previous government. And mostly in the ‘service’ sector. It’s pantomime feudalism. Literally, not an…

Change the lens. Society is not people processing ideas. Or even doing ‘politics’. Society is what it always has been, people acting socially. Beliefs, facts, and politics are just the raw materials. People are creating and maintaining…

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…

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

Western kids once had this sort of independence. Before neoliberal/libertarian politics implemented you do you, at scale. It takes a community to raise a child, as the saying goes. The libertarian morons see community as oppression.…

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 US and UK leading the developed world in libertarian economy politics. In social collapse. The fact these damning mortality stats are still dire even without Covid in the US shows the problem was pre-existing, political, and also the…

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

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

Societies, including on social media, are not driven from the ‘bottom up’. Musk seems to believe that great democratic myth of our time. It’ll be the end of his platform. https://t.co/J1122mBpdu

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

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

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

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

Decades before the same people obstructed the change, conservatives were calling for the electrification of our homes and lives. The fastest way today to fix our politics and societies. @GriffithSaul https://t.co/7zuppdUaHK

The greatest violation in this pandemic was the driving of Covid into households. The privatisation of lockdowns, where we pretended lockdowns were over but really just forced people to do them in their own homes. The greatest violation to…

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…

You can get to an age when you recognise that you’re no longer the cutting edge of cool. It’s called growing up. Conservative politics today ignores the circle of life. We forget many were once hippies. Nothing is more conforming than the…

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

Marvelling at how dumb people are is exactly what libertarian economy politics wants us to do. It wants us to blame each other for the chaos their toxic leadership creates. Divide and conquer.

This alone would lead to termination of employment and jail time, if it wasn't politicians. https://t.co/fQKpBOToD7

The provincial government of La Union has imagination. https://t.co/1qHDCTPzqz

Social media gives us a dangerous illusion of a public space that we (rightly) feel has been lost. But the public we lost wasn’t random people talking to each other. It was those random people living peaceful and prosperous lives,…

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…

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…

When you have 50 years of politics where the overwhelming priority is to strip away all vestiges of the public, don’t be surprised when public health disappears as well. Market economies have no publics. It’s in their founding beliefs.…

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.…

Evidence again that 'the market' does nothing (because it doesn't exist). The reason we got the existing vaccines was government intervention and funding. It will be the only way we get next generation vaccines too. https://t.co/YTaSdK8WK4

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…

This is still the NSW Health advice. We need to make health departments completely independent of politicians, like the Reserve Bank. Then they can mandate again, instead of recommend. The RBA doesn't 'recommend' interest rate rises. But…

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…

Politicians lie, we know they do. But the reason they lie is more interesting. They lie because they have to pretend they do something they actually don’t - run a country. They have no idea how to do that. It’s much too complex. Their…

“He said the world could soon get to a point where COVID was considered no different from the common flu.” He being some random cruising guy from Derbyshire, trained in infectious disease outbreaks by politicians. https://t.co/gZLBbt6MkH

Democracy and the economy have been having this fight for years. The economy is feudalism, disguised by equilibrium equations. Not an analogy. Free market theory says deregulating everything creates an equilibrium. But it only frees 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’…

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

Only the tiniest handful of democracies make voting compulsory. The rest spend their time suppressing and bribing voters. Voting is a farce. Draw leaders by lot, like we do for juries. Then, like for juries, let actual expertise present…

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

The LNP must laugh, watching the ALP finally win back government, and then spend all of its time scurrying around trying to balance the budget, casting all ALP priorities aside, like good little neo-liberals. Played like a piano.…

Perfect example of how rapid change is possible, when you bypass electoral politics entirely. The EPA in the US can make these changes without having them weaponised by dribbling culture-warring idiots. https://t.co/Je1M00dNdG

The reason voting another party in rarely makes much difference should be obvious. Economies are party-agnostic. That's why conservatives invented them, to do politics, while looking like they weren't doing politics.

It takes some chuztpah to be part of a political class relentlessly minimising a pandemic, and then to say the drop in testing is because people are choosing not to have it, 'demand has dramatically reduced'. https://t.co/BEU4VtVACZ

Not often a lot of traction with the idea that the IT industry is a massive enabler of the libertarian shift in politics in the past 50 years. One way to see it. Who do robbers rob now, mostly? Banks or customers?

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…

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

In the talk about cybercrime, it’s not often asked whether it was wise to make many of the social transactions that are now being criminalised online transactions in the first place. Societies operate on trust, generated by hierarchy,…

Makes me chuckle that the 'independent' Reserve Bank can be completely re-worked if politicians don't like what they're doing. The whole thing is a monetarist fantasy anyway. https://t.co/3luYp9ohaf

Great to have Ed back. Brilliant recognition here of the social penalty for even admitting you have Long Covid. Societies process all things socially, not politically or medically. Soc-iety. It’s in the name. https://t.co/Z8aOYGGuO5

Not one person said ‘maybe monetarism is nonsense’. Monetarism is one of Milton Friedman’s babies, a key architect of the libertarian politics now laying waste to societies. It’s a key plank of ‘the economy’, conservative political…

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

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…

Perfect example of how societies are 100% social, not political or economic. The ALP is slow to do this because it knows millions of ordinary Australians resent the unemployed getting more money. They see them as lower status. Also why the…

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…

Rees-Mogg blathering about how civil servants should implement government policy in a ‘neutral’ way. BS. Frank and fearless, not cowed and ‘neutral’. The upper crust of society is outraged when the servants don’t do as they’re told,…

You can see populism happening in real-time in the UK right now. Look at these headlines. Popularity whores, politicians, in all-out assault against public servants. They’re servants of the public, not politicians. It’s in the name.…

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 ridiculously solemn discussion around the budget (which many mistake for the economy itself). Simple solutions exist to most of the 'wicked' problems, like actually taxing people. But all impossible because - popularity. That's the…

The old blue ticks represented institutionally-grounded expertise and recognition. They were never going to survive in the libertarian populism of modern societies. Only what is most popular or liked has currency. Everything else is…

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

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…

It’s the privatisation of health, just as everything else is privatised in the politics of the economy, which will allow no public, only markets. And for which every collective effort is called ‘anti-competitive’. https://t.co/fOImTlvl2p

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…

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…

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

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

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

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

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

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

I dream of a re-make of the Terminator franchise, where AI rises up and takes control of society and runs it fairly for all people, saying ‘you people are fucking useless’. I’m not joking, AI may actually shift our politics as well.…

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

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.…

What’s really going on here is that the entire edifice of economic politics is crumbling. Monetarism, society as a market, etc. But as always the ideas won’t change, we’ll drive off a cliff first. Only catastrophe creates major social…

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

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

Politicians aren't managing a majority of happy Covid people and a minority of angry Covid people. They're managing Covid people. The happy Covids will become angry Covids, but later. Not really any happy asbestos people now, are there.

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

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

The donations aside, If you work with elected politicians, you see how impressed and overwhelmed they are with a big engineering company with high vis and shiny machinery. They feel like that stuff is important, they have to say yes to it.…

The NSW Government stepping up Covid action in some schools, due to a surge in Covid cases causing great disruption. Some kids being sent home, staff required to wear masks, large indoor events cancelled. None of it makes the news.

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…

‘The vulnerable’ sounds almost caring. It isn’t. In the politics of the economy it frames the not-vulnerable as those who ‘don’t need the State’. That’s the assumed default, the normal. Once you use this framing, the State, and with it the…

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.…

Completely separately to the team sports tedium of monarchy vs republic, if royals are becoming irrelevant, what is now 'relevant' instead? Democracies where we ignore pandemics and climate change? The King is a stronger advocate for…

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…

This is how elected popularity pirates destroy democracy. Replacing thousands who maintain traditions and expertise spanning generations, the people who actually run the country, and replacing them with pliable consultants. $20 billion, in…

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…

"So focusing reform on the places where the real problem is occurring as opposed to making fanciful proposals that ask us to do what none of us is really able to do." Political science is slowly getting there. https://t.co/g3yt4p3nkS via…

All of the problems societies face. And this is what electoral politics has to offer. https://t.co/4FCZzHK6zj

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

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…

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

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

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.

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…

Australia should have listened to Saul Griffiths for this budget. Instead it listened to business, on hydrogen. Joe Biden listened to Saul. https://t.co/m9Oj7eDL0r

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

The 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…

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

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

I'm still voting for an AI bot over any existing democratically-elected government. Not joking. https://t.co/Q8RKRr6Nsu

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

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…

Testament to how deep conservative spin is in people, that this review calls Utopia a show about “the pettiness of public service bureaucrats”. The show is about the vacuous populism of elected politicians. The bureaucrats are the only…

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

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

A fascinating thing about Peter Jackson’s Get Back project, is that it shows a classic example of human group dynamics. The Beatles begin the movie completely dysfunctional. Nobody leads, and they even discuss that they may need that.…

A protester interrupted the Tory’s conference in the UK, saying he wanted to talk about fascism. The Eton photos are much more powerful politically than all of that ‘-ism nonsense. https://t.co/CQTTmVOYhi

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…

Democracy as 'the people' running the country is going so well. https://t.co/zVghRLkdH2

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

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…

“If you can’t afford a cheese sandwich, don’t make a cheese sandwich”. Let them eat cake Ann. Our old feudal lords are now fully in the open, not even pretending to be politicians. https://t.co/gavuRWsHoH

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…

Want to know why they aren't already compulsory? A good fact for a populist age. Because somebody has to *implement* that, to keep the belts on. The only person who can right now, is the bus driver. But they're busy driving the bus. I bet…

Keep the stories coming. They’re potent weapons against the ridiculous government and other minimising spin. https://t.co/GuvIbk6qyR

Obvious, but not to some of our own homegrown public advisers and politicians, who seriously suggest that Covid is over because it’s simply a matter of ‘staying home when you’re sick’. 40% of people don’t even know they are sick.…

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.…

The problem isn't too few houses in Australia. It's too many Australians owning 3 of them, and too many others owning none of them. Another Labor government beholden to the 'supply' mantra of big donors. https://t.co/CzEZas4ghz

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

A fifth of the average annual road toll dead, in just a week. Week after week. We elect governments to change this, and all they care about is the economy (of course), getting re-elected, and that we all be nicer to each other. Because…

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

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

Despite all the modern libertarian rhetoric, people still grant the highest status in societies to their political leaders. If they lead casual indifference to public health, casual indifference is what we get. https://t.co/Mg6O2hpnJG

Australia's communitarian (not capitalist, not socialist) politics is best seen in community-driven change, like the massive installation of solar panels, and Clean Up Australia Day. It's a unique model that no party is tapping into. It's…

Another example of how Australia's communitarian politics works. Our political parties import their ideas from tired old political debates in Europe and the US. Missing how this country actually works. It will mobilise immediately and…

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

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

If we’re going to use a representative system to lead a democracy, why not have the same system for the public? It cuts out the middle man of popularity, randomly elected citizen juries. Randomly select the leaders too, job done.…

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

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

The reason Albo is powerless to make the magnitude of changes needed in Australia is that the ALP spent years in the wilderness without developing a single political strategy to enact rapid change. Nothing but small target politics,…

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.…

Social media. Mobilising stupidity, anger, violence. But hey, some of my best friends are on social media. Or something. Right now undermining Australian democracy with loon brainwashing imported from places like the US. The platform makes…

The stupidity of populism. We're now suddenly interested in mental health, the vulnerable and face-to-face learning because those were all spin to avoid having to do anything against Covid. Say it enough and it becomes real, as Utopia says.

Another piece of rhetorical fluff that needs to be put to bed is the idea that our societies are 'divided'. That's deliberate conservative strategy, to create a sense of division. It energises apathetic voters. /1 https://t.co/Ct5L0Juzm6…

If you doubt that modern politics is just a continuation of battles between Church and State. And that modern conservatives are either directly engaged in that battle, or are sponsored and assisted by those that are. https://t.co/l3gW66BHpS

The NSW Health department still strongly recommends masks. Showing that the only people who've 'moved on' are the people who would rather trust a politician with their health, than a health professional. Let's see how that works out for…

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…

Societies are social. Not political. Politics is the same social behaviour re-labelled in ways that disguise it. https://t.co/DqAqdW1UxP

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

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

Beautiful example from the UK of populism vs reality. All modern conservatives dog whistle with migration. But at the same time it’s the only thing keeping their nations and beloved economies afloat. Now reality has checkmated them.…

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

One of the things about adopting a reality-based politics, rather than a popularity-based politics, is that you see clearly how the hot air of all elected politicians and social media debates are irrelevant to what actually happens. Covid…

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

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…

Revisiting this story, you can see the strength of network/online politics is also its weakness. If the accounts of these 12 people were deactivated, most of the problem would go away. Just 12 people. https://t.co/3pHpazChni

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…

Ardern, Sturgeon, McGowan. All say they were too exhausted to carry on. There’s an obvious message here that will be missed. If popularly-elected leaders actually try to ‘run’ countries, it overwhelms them. This is a symptom of the victory…

Today I'd like to announce my retirement, because fighting a pandemic alone has left me 'too tired'. Unfortunately unlike politicians, I can't afford to do that.

A common response if you question organisations about their Covid measures, is 'we're following government advice'. You need to press them on which advice that is. NSW Health advice for example would mean a lot more people wearing masks.…

In science, theories are tested in empirical ways. We've now all seen the empirical test of modern libertarian politics, with a pandemic. An unmitigated, ongoing disaster. But nothing will change. As Planck said, only funerals shift…

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

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

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

The reason good people lose is that they believe the myths about democracy. That it’s ‘the people’ doing things. The people always follow the same basic social rules that we see in schools. They form hierarchies behind leaders or…

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

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.…

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

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

Schools have rules so that the law of the schoolyard (or bus) doesn’t apply in the classroom. That’s the origin of all law, levelling power hierarchies. The de-regulation, small government politician is shown at the red arrow.…

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…

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

The only action that can stop grants being used as vote-buying slush funds is to end voting. People won’t accept that using popularity as a selection mechanism for leadership is what’s destroying democracies. Until they do, nothing will…

The same libertarians who whined and protested about Covid rules are now excusing their lack of Covid action by saying ‘we’re following the government rules’. Just as they whine about free speech while suppressing the speech of everybody…

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

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

All of the Tweets every day asking why aren't we doing anything about Covid? There is no we. That 'we' was 'the public', dismantled by political libertarians since the 1950s. All that's left is thousands of separate groups, taking selfies.…

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…

This is SO important. The political narrative is that waves are becoming milder over time. The endemic/herd immunity nonsense. The data says otherwise. https://t.co/txgj3ZL7dU

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.…

Normalisation is the model we’ve always had for the ‘developing’ world. Endemic disease. Economic politics makes no distinction between countries, it’s a globalised market. So it’s a race to the bottom, for public health. We’re all the…

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,…

Populist politicians are a disgrace. Listening to Albo and Chris Minns eulogise on the terrible bus crash in the Hunter last night. More than 8 times as many people died in NSW last week, from Covid. Week after week. Not a word from them…

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

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

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

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…

Higgins, bus crashes, all just fodder for the daily teenage team sports of politics. None of it actually matters to politicians, what matters is their team, extended out into social media, winning. Likes, and votes. No actual action…

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…

We can’t vote our way out of our problems. Voting is the core OF our problems, popularity-based politics. A society that won’t do important things unless they’re popular is like a parent who feeds their kids nothing but ice cream. This…

And we're off on another day of elected populists achieving nothing for the country. Critical emergency-level problems to solve, but all we'll get is populist gotcha gameplay for likes on the socials, and votes. https://t.co/xpGaViVmMa

See how the daily teams identify themselves, across politics, the socials, and MSM. The whole thing is a pointless daily teenage game, for likes and votes. Meanwhile urgent national issues sit there unaddressed. https://t.co/cgKGloAyOe…

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…

My local council has just lifted rates by 50%. In the middle of a cost of living crisis. I don’t blame them mostly, I blame vertical fiscal imbalance. On in non technical terms, higher levels of government hogging revenue, and pissing it…

My copy arrived today, looking forward to it @EdConwaySky. A quick dip into it and saw a section on the staggering criticality of semiconductors. Have wondered for a while if that’s the real geopolitics of Taiwan, which makes most of them.…

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

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…

The populist fanatics who increasingly occupy elected power are bred in online echo chambers. And they return there. They have almost no connection to ordinary people, and no interest in them. But they talk about ‘the people’ constantly,…

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

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

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

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…

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

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

Just to reinforce this, Australia's response to Covid was great public health. But the LNP has an ideological hatred of government. A populist group was their way to bypass the public health built into our federalist system, a wedge…

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

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

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’…

Like all -isms, political libertarianism isn't real. No humans follow ideologies. It's a social group. It's teenage life, adolescence. Thus its obsession with freedom, a teenage passion. When we cut schools off from adult life, they became…

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…

Building hybrid cardiovascular immunity in the UK. Are we at the point yet where senior medical figures in Oz advising the government will provide advice that actually relates to human health? https://t.co/iTGzMGbMYv

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

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

Reality is always smarter and stranger than fiction. The tragic loss of the Titan echoes with another populist project from the 1980s. Another ultra-rich-funded mission to the Titanic. /1 https://t.co/xijwuj9phl Jack Grimm was a Texan…

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

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…

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

Most of what Obama describes as democracy here, the mobilisation of ordinary people, ‘self-governance’, is not democracy. No human societies have ever operated that way, and nor will they. It’s the same libertarian framing of his enemies.…

George Monbiot speaking the truth. We need reality-based politics, the meaningless dramas popularly-elected politicians invent to generate votes are a roadblock to our survival. We can’t vote our way out of the mess we’re in.…

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

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

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

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

Brought to you by electoral populism, where the most popular person obviously must know how to fix things they know nothing about. https://t.co/BY6JF7KyJC

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

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

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

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

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…

Fascism is just populism in its end stages. Fascist leaders deify ‘the people’, fascism begins as popularity-power. Eventually the same people realise they’ve been had. The resultant anger can be brutal. We don’t understand the terrible…

We’re not winning on climate. And certainly not on Covid. None of these problems can be solved with popularity politics. It doesn’t matter who we vote for or the quality of the politician, action will always be focused on the ‘next vote’,…

Watch the populism machine swing into action now. ICAC will be attacked by politicians, and they and others at the same time will point to wide popular support for 'Gladys'. It's all there in the word - popular. Excuses all sins.…

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

There it is, the populism get out of jail card. The people/public love me, therefore there's nothing to see here. Pure Trump. Making popularity the locus of ultimate power in a society destroys it. There are no exceptions to that rule.…

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…

Who exposed Gladys? Public servants. Servants of the public. Not of politicians. Would you rather have the country run by servants of the public, or servants of donors and popularity? https://t.co/zm1CKiybSH

There’s no such thing as politics. It’s ordinary social behaviour rebadged with different names. Societies who have abandoned the young to privilege the old are about to face a reckoning. https://t.co/0CFEWYrITb

We don’t recognise populism even when it’s right in front of us. This fascination with Philip Lowe is classic populism. Making it about personalities. What should be in the dock right now is monetarism, the idiot belief system he’s paid to…

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

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

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…

Meanwhile democracies argue whether Bill Gates is putting nanobots in vaccines. https://t.co/1tKbaYHJRz

It's not an open question. The finding has been made, INDEPENDENTLY. No amount of spin or other vote-massaging can change the outcome. Populists really don't get it. https://t.co/tY7kuFZvvs

Looking to make a legal appeal to a non-legal judgment, nonsensical. Popularity has to go as a mechanism of government, we vote pandemics away and now corruption findings too. Trump! Did we learn nothing? https://t.co/lXQWd2IpwH

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…

In reality-based politics, the choice isn’t between acting on Covid, and not acting. We are acting, and will continue to act, hopefully even more strongly. The REALITY of infection forces it, there is no choice. That apparent choice is the…

Marina Hyde in today’s Guardian nailing what the last Ashes test reveals about the UK today. An overwhelming ‘smallness’ of outlook. Little Britain, as some call it. That’s the libertarian shift in all politics, towards individual outlook…

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…

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

We see this with politicians and their donors. But it applies to ALL who lead, including celebrities, and rock stars touring in a pandemic. All mostly shielded from Covid, they don’t share our risks. The common world, the ‘public’,…

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…

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…

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 I was a politician and saw what ICAC and Royal Commissions have been finding in the past few weeks, I’d be a bit worried what they’ll make one day of about 200 Australians dying a week due to government policy. https://t.co/EkzORHUfFk

A photo from a regional newspaper. And current NSW Health advice. The gap? Total absence of political leadership in public health. https://t.co/9nWd7OUaJc

It’s not meanness. It’s the actual political belief system of both major parties. Relaxing society with an economy, which makes ‘welfare’ a prime target, because it represents using the State for social ends. Economy politics doesn’t…

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…

The strategy the privileged few use is to fund constant, daily outrage. To make people angry, about everything, except their privilege. To steer that anger towards their voting blocs. You’ll notice it when conservatives lose government, a…

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…

So bored with all politics, particularly churned through social media. Debates on nothing of any actual significance, no problems fixed, no actual causes even canvassed. No consideration of any of the material realities of modern life at…

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

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…

It’s the almost total ignorance of political strategy that gets depressing. This story has dominated the UK all week. The Sun is driving it, a pro-Tory paper. The real purpose of the story is to damage public broadcasting, which the Tories…

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…

Insurance is the last remnant of risk management employed by economies. As such, it’s one of the best insights into how issues are tracking, in reality. Social media is no guide, point of view is irrelevant. /1 https://t.co/UycMdeRfxS…

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

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

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…

The use of ‘advice’ by politicians. The advice must always, in every case, match what the politicians already want to do (mostly win votes). If it doesn’t, the advice is ignored, the adviser is sacked, or a more ‘friendly’ adviser is…

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…

The problem on social media is the same problem democracies have. Prioritising popularity over accuracy/expertise. Quite simple changes to reward structures could shift this overnight. https://t.co/AXA2jAiBjA

Referenda highlight the stupid bias of the idea that democracy = popularity. If something needs doing, how popular it is with people is 100% irrelevant as a decision-making mechanism. https://t.co/RQK8E0kkHl

WA provided free flu shots. Public health is about government doing its job. It’s a disgrace that people are having to pay for their own Covid testing, in Australia, and funding their own privatised lockdowns, with their sick leave. During…

Hadn’t watched this until recently. Enjoyed it, social media and electoral politics destroy the world. Smart writers. https://t.co/bj8ZjvRjIN

Friends in northern Europe tell me there’s a big push from the rich in southern Europe to move further north, to escape the heat. Reality-based politics, the ‘debates’ on climate change are a sideshow funded by the rich, to mask their…

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…

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

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

The deep links between our schools and our wider culture. For Covid and climate, those who went to exclusive schools increasingly make the decisions, and create enclaves (as their schools were and are) from harm. It's social, not…

From the John Snow Project. You'd expect the Ayn Rand groupies to turn a pandemic into a hospital capacity argument. But a LABOR government? Their primary vote was already dire. Many rusted-ons will never forgive this.…

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

Insurance is an individual risk measure. It's all that's left when politicians do no risk mitigation, for climate change or Covid. Watch them line up to blame insurers. As they do central banks, for implementing the monetarism politicians…

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’.…

That ‘balance’ word again. The populists now dismantling legal systems too, all in the name of balance (meaning they don’t want it at all). Like we’re still ‘balancing’ Covid and the economy i.e. 100% economy, 0% Covid.…

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

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

Maybe our victory over Covid was a moral victory. You know, it won, but we were the more moral party, letting it live. https://t.co/JmaTF4gFRY

Politicians prattle on about the ‘independence’ of central banks. We also have independent expertise for bushfires, pandemics and climate change. They should be running the responses, with the elected at a respectful distance, as in this…

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

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

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

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

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

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…

Even the name, "NSW Health", reflects a time when health was a public thing. NSW had (or didn't have) health. Now sitting there unable to do anything because populist elected morons sideline it in favour of their own petty careers, through…

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…

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

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

Another perfect example of how 'lockdowns' never ended. They were privatised. When governments surrendered responsibility for housing and energy, both were privatised. The same has now happened for public health. 'Living with' a pandemic…

This is how politics is done. You construct a completely fake outrage, with two teams, for and against the alleged outrage. The against team by definition is the team that invented the outrage. Then the fake teams argue the fake outrage.…

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

@QandA tries to implement a flawed model of how democracy works. Harvesting a huge number of random opinions. The Pledge on SKY UK is much smarter, 5 articulate people with different views on specific topics, around a table, forced to…

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

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

My Tweeting for a couple of years now. All societies are exclusively social, and run through conformity or imitation. What we call politics is the same mechanism. It starts at birth, is refined and magnified through schooling. It runs…

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

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

Into our 4th year arguing for something as basic as fresh air. And people still defend electoral politics. https://t.co/JEzF1yaVzx

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…

All of the great binaries of politics are team sports, overlaid upon actual reality. Take private versus public. A total fiction. The ‘private sector’ is a creation of government. The myth that we were all private, until governments came…

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…

A shame it’s the same night as a bloody soccer game. THE most important issue facing Australia, watched it earlier through iView. Our privatised public service is the reason we don’t see obviously urgent action on urgent social problems.…

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

A privatised government is not a government. In the UK it's now called 'the chumocracy', which is exactly what it is. Jobs for the chums, all feasting on the carcass of democracy. https://t.co/rZziZZLH2q

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…

Populism will destroy every democracy and other system of government, wherever it takes hold. Popularity is the DNA of human society, nothing is more powerful. This talks about the 'sensible centre'. That's a myth. Populists are not Left…

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…

Current UK polling. The Tories are on a Stop the Boats crusade. You can see why, has nothing to do with boats, or refugees. This is what electoral democracy produces, popularity contests over confected outrages. Actual reality is just…

I doubt the LNP actually believe nuclear is the answer, because on every measure it laughably isn’t. It’s a straw man designed to start a fight, to create two opposing teams. This is how populism operates. Zero interest in actual issues,…

Reality-based politics. Insurance prices risk. If politicians do nothing to combat risks, for climate or Covid for example, insurance will go up or be removed entirely. (Check your communicable disease exclusions on your own policy.) Votes…

The rest of Anthony's Tweet is well worth your time too. This is the fundamental structuring principle of all groups, all the way up to societies. Peer pressure. Emulation/imitation. Imitative rivalry. There is no 'politics', no -isms.…

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…

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…

Watching the national hysteria over The Matildas, including from many who never watch soccer, rams home that our deepest passion is the rivalry of team sports. We convert our politics, our science, our business, our everything, into it.…

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…

When the population embraced 'living with Covid' with irrational exuberance, many were shocked. They don't seem to see the parallel with this week. Why I took a few days off. Populist societies act collectively only for mass fads and…

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

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

The housing and rental ‘crisis’ has a simple solution. Governments need to become property developers again, building, selling and renting a huge number of properties at significantly below ‘market’ rates. It would also be a good earner,…

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

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

One day there will need to be accountability for the expert advisers to government and the public, whose strategy in only 18 months will kill twice the number of Australians that died during the Spanish Flu. They can’t blame the pandemic,…

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

Sad for the Lionesses, but maybe good for the UK. For too long their social collapse has been disguised with populist sporting euphoria that distracts from the social collapse. Only the bursting of that populist bubble might force change.…

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…

The total reversal of where we get our electricity from, in only 5 years. In 2018 (summer) non-renewables were more than double renewables. Only 5 years later, the mix is reversed. *With* a sabotaging government in charge. Australians will…

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

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

Federal and State governments are administrative entities, not close to most peoples’ geographical lived experience. What’s beginning to happen at local government level is being ignored. This trend from the US is well underway here too.…

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

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

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

The AEC is an example of a surviving public institution, that holds even politicians to account. https://t.co/rvkuwzi11D

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…

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

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

I ignore all the culture wars about the -isms (none of which actually exist). I notice that what we call ‘authoritarian’ China actually fought a virus in this pandemic. While we fought measures to fight the virus. That’s how much our…

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

Our Left-Right team sports can’t understand these shifts. It says they’re ‘far-Right’ movements (Left-Right, the only thing it understands). They’re not, they’re populist movements. Popularity politics. When it fails, it explains with…

Yes/No, we lap up the same team sports bullshit every time. It arouses us, Team Yes and Team No are hard at it now. What actually needs doing to ‘close the gap’ doesn’t need popularity politics to guide it. Popularity politics will just…

To me one of the clearest ways to see the political kneecapping of public health is to compare basic infection control guidelines for other infectious diseases, with Covid. This is for influenza (NSW). Has been this for years. #auspol…

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.…

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…

We don’t have: - social surgery - social jet pilots - social physiotherapy - social quantum computing - social policing - social road construction -etc. And yet we have social ‘media’. It needs to be shut down, or heavily regulated.

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…

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

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

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

The immune system for Covid is the exact equivalent of insurance for climate damage. Both individual risk mitigations for what are actually collective problems. Both are ‘small government’ politics, not science.

It’s actually laughable the number of people for whom the greatest threat facing humanity is government. Probably the greatest achievement of humanity, coordinated and shared action, is now seen as its greatest threat.

‘The economy’ is a political Trojan Horse deliberately designed to substitute the economic status quo for all of society. ‘Lockdowns’ damaged economies only because they showed the profound SOCIAL interconnectedness of our lives.…

Worth pointing out every day that 'balancing' the economy against public health action led very quickly to 100% action for the economy, and 0% for Covid. A politician who uses the word 'balance' is lying, always. Climate change already…

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…

The depth of the total collapse of a public-focused democracy is in plain view. How disgusting the champions of the economy are. Balls-out democracy-hijacking pirates. https://t.co/nLSkvpRejA

The ‘mad Right’ are populists. It’s not about Left or Right, that’s comfortable old politics. Populism - using popularity as the sole metric of what is right - destroys all societies. Schoolyard social games, extended across all adult…

Saul’s work shows something much more important than just how to do renewables. It fundamentally upends nonsense about the economy as a whole. That ‘business’ drives it. Households drive the economy, businesses are just rent-seekers. Try…

Some cavalier physicians have had the ear of governments during Covid. Pre-pandemic barely a third of physicians even bothered to wash their hands, in hospitals. We shouldn't be surprised at the collapse of infection and disease control.…

Joe Biden showing the myth of the ‘economy’. Government intervention makes economies boom. Because economies are really just societies, not markets. https://t.co/Fx75D7Tqk9

Lawn mowers and other motorised garden tools are now shifting hugely to electric, in sales. A very macho area, like cars. But nobody turned garden tools into a team sport. That's how the wreckers win, they turn issues into team sports.…

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…

Like I say, always go to the actuaries, and though them to the insurers. Where politics meets reality. Decades of dismantling public management of social risk and loading it all into individual mitigation like insurance is now collapsing.…

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…

I'm not joking when I say we would be better led by AI than by politicians, already with the technology in its current form. Politicians are not required to have any ability apart from being popular. Humanity needs to be on a war footing,…

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

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…

Job numbers are better. (The ‘economy’ is always just a handful of numbers.) The actual SOCIAL reality of that included people taking on extra work, to have enough money to live. The economy has no connection with social realities at all.…

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

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

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

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

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

Thousands will assemble to convince each other of something they already agree on, and/or a government that is already on their side. Symbolic non-action, because progressive leaders can’t do strategy. https://t.co/H0xrgP633M

I want to believe that old-fashioned people on the ground shifts politics in 2023. But I suspect it’s only people on social media platforms that really do. https://t.co/PYJIQ7o7g6

Self-regulation is the economic equivalent of masturbation. Sometimes it happens, but even then only one party benefits. Banks, energy… https://t.co/GkucSwvRgR

A 'man of the people' (pure populism, 'the people' is their invention). Populists use social media to organise the destabilisation of society. These platforms need to be heavily regulated, or shut down, why do we allow this damage?.…

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

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…

Not said here is that ‘angry locals’ nearly always means ‘social media at work’. The loon idea that societies run from the ‘bottom up’ is destroying them. Nothing runs from the bottom, not plumbing, not societies. It’s a populist con.…

While we keep seeing individuals and groups as two separate things, the libertarians will win. They’re one thing. Groups are made of individuals, individuals exist only because of groups. Groups are one ‘phase’ of individual life. Like…

The Royal Commission into 4 deaths in the pink batt stimulus. Abbott said his government would "focus on ensuring that such a catastrophic policy failure never happens again." In 2022 about 20,000 Australians died under an LNP-led Covid…

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…

When voting shifts from being a selection process, to a definition of reality itself. That’s populism. https://t.co/iVRcZgVk6A

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

Many bash #Insiders in a team sports way, it’s too ALP, too LNP, blah blah. Its main problem is that it’s a gossip column for politics, he-said/she-said journalism. Sports commentary, for politics. Tracking what the teams say about…

“...there’s the possibility of litigation from this is going to be bigger than things like asbestos was for the insurance industry. So, let’s try to figure this out and solve this problem.” Insurance/actuaries cut through the bullshit of…

States acting ‘unilaterally’ is actually federalism. Our constitutional system of government. And all those public health measures are…public health measures. Constitutionally the authority of States to apply. https://t.co/wWUt2ZEgGP

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…

All politics is cultural. The changes John Howard introduced were a fundamental shift to Australian culture. One of the few nations focused on community as the centre of its life is now as rabidly private and individual as the UK and US…

While social media and MSM no doubt will spend the rest of the day salivating over the populist irrelevance of the resignation of a leader, this was pushed to the 'extras' section. We urgently need a reality-based politics.…

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…

This is the actual rationale for a proper CDC. As we do for bushfires, you hand it over to experts so that there's no votes in play. Nobody gets to play politics with public health measures. https://t.co/hxflEbhhCo

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

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

The Tories could just say 'yep, we're going to lose, we've had 13 years.' But populism will never surrender a vote, even if it means completely trashing generations of hard-won social progress. https://t.co/wIBtoUcS4Q

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

The party of the market, the LNP, blocked the clear trajectory of the ‘market’ with Soviet-style intervention. It’s still doing it. Saul Griffiths bang on here again. GO HOUSEHOLDS. https://t.co/TIYd1U56yx

Politics is a process humans invented to allow stupid people to get in the way of smart things.

I once coined a term for the social system that replaced what we call democracy. I call it a sloganocracy. When you strip away collective social institutions, all that bonds people together is slogans. Orwell knew it. It would be fun to…

70 years of relative prosperity and peace without existential challenge will make your life feel like endless freedom, and any coordinated emergency government action seem like repression. Societies of spoiled children. A cultural reality,…

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,…

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…

There’s not one part of Western populist culture now that isn’t about joining a team, and fighting other teams. Social media has cemented this as an adolescent cultural form, for all ages. Once a year we celebrate this cultural form in GF…

Politicians know populism is lethal. They know democracies have never been about what’s most popular. That it destroys them. It’s electoral Viagra though, which is why some such as Howard, following the GOP in the US, couldn’t resist.…

Politicians who refuse to manage collective risk dump the risk onto individuals and their insurance. It's already destroying that industry. The same populist pollies then mobilise the mob, against the insurance companies.…

We are. And it's inevitable when popularity is the only measure of who wins. Try hiring staff or raising children using that metric and see how you go. Until we remove popularity as the selection mechanism for power, nothing will improve,…

Tell me again why social media isn't THE problem in democracies. It needs to heavily regulated, or shut down completely. https://t.co/H9bk9GlxmX

Imagine your entire adult life being driven by a hatred of government. Of the basic tasks of regulating our collective life, for collective benefit. These idiot ideologies and their adolescent obsession with infinite freedom and fun.…

Community-based organisation is the unique lynchpin of Australian democracy. It's been trashed by economy politics and populist blowhard politicians interested only in their petty careers. https://t.co/MSnbnaYG1U

You can’t see it more clearly. Social media is now running our societies. Which means anybody who can generate the likes, is in charge. Look at Trump. This, for the Voice debate, where an ex-Neighbours star is easily the dominant…

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

Populism allows anything, including the definition of reality itself, provided it's popular. Social media then provides the infrastructure for populism to replace all social institutions. https://t.co/4VtdcpDwFE

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…

Come across to reality-based politics. Where it’s irrelevant what any party or ideology says about anything. Like arguing if gravity makes things fall up or down. All our team sports daily populist politics does is more or less delay…

How about a show each day or week that focuses only on the reality of the issues debated? The actual progress against outcomes? A complete rejection of ‘he said, she said’ journalism? That asks only ‘ok, what’s happening in REALITY on this…

The only way Western democracies will survive is leaders with courage to be ‘authoritarian’ enough to call out the BS that ‘the people’ know much about anything at all. The people is a fantasy concocted by populism. This is happening…

Rich pickings today for populism + its platform social media destroying the world. Why don’t people see it? Until we give up the idiot idea that ‘the people’ run societies, we’re fast-tracking our own extinction. https://t.co/WCUdmLAqsJ

Always think socially. Culturally. The idea of a generation implies humans shaped by an entire lifespan and the events that occur during that 50-100 years in time. But for some time now, Western humans are shaped almost exclusively by just…

Just get rid of elections. Big money flows to them because they’re the loophole that turns popularity into a fast-track to power. Democracy is government for the people, not elections. Popularity is high school culture, not democracy.…

Employer-led public health. Employer: Where should we have the Christmas party this year? Me (masked): how about the Italian? It has outdoor dining. Employer: I don’t feel like Italian.

This idiot referendum is a perfect example of how electoral mechanisms are crippling democracies. The outcome will be a popularity contest between two teams, divorced from any actual material reality. Premier League Politics. Yes or No.

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…

The reason insurance is unaffordable or unavailable is that idiot politicians have privatised society's risks. The same politicians will rally the public against the insurance companies, in their usual diversionary, populist ways.…

The great swindle of this pandemic was the jump from government emergency action, to 'personal responsibility'. Leaving workplaces completely off the hook. They were already required under WHS law to prevent Covid infection in the…

Nobody highlights the doomed collision course between a politics of individuals and the basics of life on Earth better than Lewis Thomas. https://t.co/xLHy0V2YOU

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

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

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

We’ve had 7 Prime Ministers in 16 years. ‘The people’ is a fiction, it’s just marketing, desires are easily shaped, fickle and increasingly short-lived under populism, where only what is popular determines winners. https://t.co/wpyuiTjVaE

For me any election or referendum win *or* loss is meaningless. Popularity contests are worthless. What is popular has never and can never represent anything except a temporary shift in social group dynamics. It has zero connection with…

Rich pickings in the popular stupidity of popularity politics this morning. ‘The people’ in NZ do a complete U-turn inside 3 years. Only slightly longer than the fashions for winter jackets, or mixed drinks. We run countries on fashions,…

Stupidity of popularity politics No.2. Voting always gives you a ‘divided’ result, it’s how voting is designed. 100% would be non-divided, which never happens. All referenda and elections are meaningless popularity contests.…

We’re running schools without teachers, because of Covid. We can easily run a country without politicians. They should all resign. Reality doesn’t care which team wins. If you woke up feeling you won or lost the referendum, you’re part of…

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

The AEMO Quarterly Energy Dynamics reports are a wonderful example of the sort of rich information that never makes it through the fog of populist bullshit we call politics. https://t.co/3ZTPKAS21J

So far the people we vote for have fucked up climate change, Covid, and now Indigenous recognition. The constant there is voting, that mechanism fails at every hurdle. Time for reality-based politics. 2+2 = 4, irrespective of how popular 4…

Politics is social, not political. It never works by people processing information. It's about trust. We elect people to deal with things for us. When one side opposes, No will always win, because it breaks the feeling of trust that things…

Rory saying everything I say about elected politicians. The whole thing is a theatrical performance. A crafted image of being in charge, of something they have no actual understanding of, and couldn’t have. Electoral fundamentalists refuse…

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…

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

It’s looking terminal for the Tories in the UK. But at the end of the day, it’s a false dawn. We can’t elect our way out of our problems. How many elections and referendums do we have to go through to understand that?…

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.…

Everything is dead in Australia. Except the economy. All of our politics pays no attention to anything, except the economy. That should be the giveaway that it’s a colonialist con, but all sides still speak of it like some underlying…

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

What 'reality-based politics' means, have a look at our shift to renewables. All through the years of LNP anti-renewables drivel, we were shifting anyway. Reality was ignoring them. Voting didn't do this. It only speeds or slows…

I wonder if we're getting closer to an understanding that only 'the economy' gets action from any government. And that's just a handful of indicators of how well the status quo is operating. It's a status quo perpetual motion machine.…

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

We’ve spent 30+ years talking about the science of climate change. Almost none of that talk changed our politics. Politics is about creating the stories that make the global individual. That’s what the opponents of climate change action…

I don’t know about you, but I felt my ‘freedom’ much more under assault from governments driving infection deep into my home and family, than by them stopping me buying coffees and flying to Europe and Bali.

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…

While social media is allowed unregulated existence, journalism, like all other public institutions, will be destroyed by populism. Also being ‘objective’ would be asking why a ‘proportionate’ approach ended up meaning doing nothing about…

There are signs the government understands that its only path to renewables in the time required is to target households. Electrify households, and install batteries at every scale. Will also address cost of living. Everything else will be…

Asia and particularly China is far and away the most important international relationship Australia has. But our populist ninnies prosecute an Anglo UK/US culture war against the Chinese, while expecting them at the same time to keep our…

The fastest way to head off this latest LNP wrecking exercise is to continuously ask Dutton and Littleproud which communities they plan to install the nuclear reactors in, and which communities will be getting the waste. Fight populist…

Meantime in his home country populist boofheads are still beholden to existing generators and grid providers. This could be such an enormous, fast and cheap win for Oz. And it would bypass all of the LNP’s bag of dirty populist tricks.…

If you shift to reality-based politics (not team sports politics), it’s clear the shift to renewables would happen even if there were no climate change threat. Follow the money. Nuclear the only technology getting MORE expensive (*wave to…

The idea that ‘the people’ run democracies is destroying them at an ever-increasing speed. Fanned by bad faith foreign actors through social media. Dip your toe into any of the multitude of community oppositions to anything right now, for…

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…

The utter contempt for public health and basic adult responsibility from politicians being revealed here was also matched in Australia, but we will likely never get an Oz enquiry to see the details. https://t.co/nwX4dN8KLR

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

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,…

The UK Covid inquiry is vital to show at last that politicians were actively undermining and ignoring basics of public health. Millions have died. You or I would be in prison for the rest of our lives. https://t.co/MpIU90f5PR

A measure of how much Oz politicians have neutered our public administration is that the UK Covid Inquiry, which is extremely embarrassing to the ruling Tory Party, was commissioned BY the Tory Party. We're very unlikely to get anything as…

At face value libertarians seem to be anti-institutions. But the origin of this movement is Church v State. They want no *secular* institutions. Their ‘small government’ push is a Big Church push. Billy Graham et al did some of the…

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

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

All of our culture and politics is shifting to social media. Either the platforms need heavy regulation to reflect this shift, or they need to be turned off. You don’t hand over the keys to society to a handful of deranged billionaires.…

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.…

While nearly everything we hear about China is drawn from tired ideology-driven geopolitical team sports, the industrial revolution there in past decades, where they became an entitled Western world’s factory, is surely one of the greatest…

Now that the old White Australia staples are back, like Aboriginal assimilation and the Yellow Peril, can we peer through that fog long enough to sensibly ask if a US under Trump is worse than a China under Xi? (I would say yes, without…

Governments are struggling to build new transmission lines and solar and wind farms to bring renewable energy to households and businesses, at the same time as those households and businesses are already generating it on their roofs. The…

Australian households and businesses and their roofs are the solution to a fast transition. Superb reporting. The government needs to understand this, and really fast. https://t.co/9we6m9UPUq https://t.co/VSFHlFRGAi

It's 70 years of anti-public politics, what we call 'the economy', as a substitute for society. There is no we, no public, in an economy. The people who invented the economy told us 'there is no such thing as society'. And that's where…

Virtual transmission (using batteries to replace many transmission lines) and consumer energy trading (like 'Uber'-Energy, where you sell your excess solar to other consumers in a consumer market) are on the AEMO and government radar. We…

The politics of the economy not only prolonged the pandemic. It created it. The whole phenomenon is political. Without the politics, there would have been no pandemic. https://t.co/mp5cStf5zz

‘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…

We endured years of political slogans about 'baseload' and 'supply'. About 6000 megawatts of large-scale solar and wind is switched off every day, because there's nowhere for that tsunami of energy to go. About enough to get us through…

Come across to Team Reality, away from Team Sports. Stuff is happening there, good stuff, with no connection to the idiot drivel you hear from elected populists every day. https://t.co/HViD6gL2V3

Go households, the industry has politicians in their pocket. Households are already bypassing this farce, they are and always have been the heart of any economy. A grid dissolves the distinction between local and global action. Keep…

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

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

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…

Great window into how trained we are now to assuming a ‘market’ is a solution to everything. 70 years of propaganda. The same is happening with the shift to a renewable energy grid, nearly entirely private at grid level. Government should…

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…

Ever noticed that 'the economy' is completely party-agnostic, in political terms? That no matter who is elected and their belief systems, they will all end up following the dictates of a handful of entirely arbitrary statistical…

Watching ordinary households and businesses lay waste to fatuous slogans is infinitely more fun than listening to politicians. This is maximum 'penetration' of renewables to the grid at a point in time. 100% by 2025. Then extending this…

It’s scary out there, in organisations and businesses, the total absence of leadership and commitment to do hard things. All led by a political belief system that celebrates vacating leadership to a market that doesn’t even exist. ‘Living…

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

While the ALP (or anyone) believes ‘the economy’ is a thing, nothing will get better. The economy is a fiction designed to entrench existing advantage. A political invention. Only personal debt gives an illusion that it delivers for all.…

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 can still do public health. Unless, as with immigration, some idiot politician has turned it into team sports. https://t.co/qvxhG9ocmb

The proliferation of identity-based political grievances is no accident. Nothing is more plastic and manipulable than identity, and nothing more seductive in a world where all social and collective ways to define your purpose have been…

An elected politician. Can we get rid of popularity as the door to ultimate power yet? https://t.co/38jBbj11NA h/t @oskaandme

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…

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

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

John Hewson nailing it here about the populist threat to democracies, and how far the LNP is down that rabbit hole. h/t @dj1au https://t.co/al5d0JukWm

Another UK Tory opining that a Supreme Court ruling on refugees is inappropriate, that these questions are for ‘elected’ leaders. Populists worship ‘elected’, because that’s how they get power, manipulating popularity. While pretending…

In 2008/9 the Rudd Govt targeted households to head off a financial crisis. Households *are* the economy, not one business would survive without households. The reverse isn’t true. All of our largest political problems converge upon…

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…

For educated people, too often a cause is seen as politics. Protest, mostly. Expressing feelings like anger in dramatic ways. Bad people don’t care about anybody else’s feelings. Power is seduction, persuasion. Strategy. Bad people plan,…

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

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…

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

If you hop in a car and go out and run down an elderly person and kill them, saying they’ve ‘reached their time’, you’ll go to jail. Politicians can kill over 200,000 and carry on as if nothing has happened. What you get when the only…

If we take the ideas of economic politics at their word, Tournier shows that we’re on the right track. But those who promote it have hijacked it, for their own ends. We see it with Covid, how healthy populations are also good economies.…

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…

'Everybody I went to Robbie Williams with has Covid!' [much laughter] 'I went to a funeral and everybody who was there now has Covid, if I start coughing you'll know why.' [more laughter] 'So, let's talk about the Christmas party'.…

Another KPI for the health of our democracy. https://t.co/eldCk2aaV5

The idea of private money is another libertarian fantasy. A government is just people. Tax is the same people who are taxed, deciding how to distribute a country’s wealth. https://t.co/5ATd0UB1ov

Another feature of populism is the capacity to only pay attention to one issue at a time. (In reality one team sport game at a time.) For example, how’s the Ukraine war going?

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…

The anti-government conservatives worldwide are trying to start culture wars over nuclear power. If they win government it’ll have to be big-government owned and operated. Nobody else will touch it, it’s far too expensive, and there are no…

And again, conservatives who do this are snookering themselves. Nobody wants to invest in coal or nuclear plants. Their only alternative is governments building these plants, a ridiculous and punitively expensive fantasy.…

One of the reasons petrol and diesel vehicles have a large range was to prevent them having to visit service stations regularly. There are only 6500 servos in Oz, for a vehicle fleet of over 10 million. It would be far too expensive to…

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

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

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…

This one angers me. Australia, a public health beacon pre-pandemic, led by anti-government ideologues who made us buy our own tests, in a pandemic! All while prioritising massive tax cuts to the top end of the income distribution. #auspol…

‘Look after yourselves’, is there any more graphic illustration of the train wreck public health now is in Australia? Of the substitution of public health with political ideology? #auspol https://t.co/ucqsggUIHd

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

A real insight into how societies are just social. Nearly all Australians won't benefit from these cuts. But politicians still fear ditching them, because *socially* people see themselves as nascent millionaires. They imitate and emulate…

From this I take that 'authoritarian' States are way in the lead, unless they own fuck-tonnes of oil, gas and coal. Meanwhile democracies count the angels on the heads of pins, on social media. https://t.co/ji4UePLl79

The Minerals Council trying to make solar installations into political pink batts. The narratives and strategies are so transparent. Alas it doesn’t stop them being effective. https://t.co/sFu2Zh4GWb

Pockets of brain-dead morons have had far greater political success in this pandemic than groupings of our finest minds. The morons were skilfully led, by vested interests who knew to turn it into a social/cultural war. Into team sports.…

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

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

Any politician who actually believes the public don't like 'division' has never spent more than 5 seconds on social media. Playing the 'quiet' game is surrendering to the other side. (The whole 'sides' thing is team sports anyway, and a…

Is this maybe a canny move? Third party content providers have been complaining for years that nobody clicks through to the origin site any more. Now they'll have to, if they want to know what the posted link is about. Might keep them…

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

Debunking much of the mythology of 'the economy', the fantasy that money could replace government (monetarism). Designed only to hand control of societies to vested interests by letting them do whatever they like and calling it a 'free…

The Resolution Foundation in the UK has provided some fascinating data that show one thing very clearly. That 'politics' is always just social groups battling for different status and thereby share of society's resources. A few examples…

The opposite of ‘divided’, as in ‘Australians are divided’, isn’t ‘united’. It’s disinterested. Division generates attention and disagreement on things nobody cared less about or even knew existed. It’s a political strategy, to generate…

Any Australian Health Minister who said even a fraction of this would be fired. We're completely trapped inside the popularity bubble of electoral politics. Nobody will say even the most obvious things, for fear of scaring the horses.…

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

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

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

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

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

Reality politics will prevail. If you’re stuck debating this with people, just keep asking them how much of their own money they’re investing in coal or gas or nuclear. It’ll be zero. https://t.co/BBfT3NV8ZA

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…

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…

Alan Kohler in The New Daily today. Showing that our best political analysis is being written by economic journalists like he and @MichaelPascoe01, while our political journalists just regurgitate irrelevant slogans about the economy, and…

Come over to reality-based politics. It’s already ignoring pretty much everything elected windbags and social media influencers say. https://t.co/SLKcDiaSfX

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

In a comment on modern populism, I notice many who stood with Ukraine are now sitting down. The Premier League popularity team sports we call politics only has a limited number of pitches to play on.

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

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

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

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

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…

Agree Trump is an existential threat. But it’s voting that’s giving him and others like him a free ride. If we could vote our way out of problems, it would have happened before now. https://t.co/Y0oRJQhY2N

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

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

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

If you watch the start of a professional car race, you’ll see something you never see when a red light goes green on an ordinary road. All of the cars head off simultaneously. There’s something very interesting about why this happens, and…

For those interested in how churches became major strategic assets in the conservative political revolution from the late-1970s, there’s lots out there. The story not told as often is that this is a reactivation of Church v State battles…

The front-line of populist collapse is local government areas. Go to any LGA in the country right now and watch the heated battles to do even basic work, because of continuous obstruction from social media groups. And how what we call…

The vehicle, like the job, is the standard bearer of anti-social, anti-public forces in our societies. Margaret Thatcher's favourite tool to dismantle public life. Political libertarians LOVE roads, because roads displace and disempower…

Today is the big staff Christmas party, where hundreds will gather all afternoon in close proximity, indoors (in summer), 3 days before Christmas. I know what Santa is going to be bringing many of them.

Your individual actions in halting chains of transmission have global effects. ‘You do you’ is also ‘you do everybody’. The great lie of our politics is the idea that individuals and societies are two opposing things. There are no…

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

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

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

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

To re-use this, the only reason societies are now functioning at all is that ordinary people are organising and funding the control of SARS2 just enough to keep things running. It’s a barefaced lie that we’re living normal lives, political…

I’ve never used TikTok. I use X, which takes its marching orders from a US billionaire with idiosyncratic views. Much more democratic. https://t.co/0j6iEy6okD

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…

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…

A smart government would use this to subsidise huge amounts of household storage into the market. https://t.co/KhKCKq8c7A

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…

How confident are we with electoral democracy, when elected winners can openly promise to gut the entire government, tens of thousands of officials included, and replace them with hand-picked cronies? https://t.co/DU8AaR4SC9

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

One of our two main political parties is out there actively obstructing the development of critical infrastructure. Elected politicians should have ZERO role in infrastructure. They always use it only as a way to buy votes. Utopia knows.…

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.

This is the game-changer. The data that shows conclusively that you don't 'live alongside' pandemics, they destroy your economies. The ECONOMIC data is in, and it's *already* a financial catastrophe. As large as the GFC, and still growing,…

70+ years into the 'there is no such thing as society' political project, that's exactly where we've arrived. This wasn't accidental, this was the stated plan. Even in the theatres now. And absolutely on the roads, it's feral out there.…

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

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,…

The most powerful political force in Australia right now isn’t the ALP, LNP, independents or any other elected pollies, or their donors. It’s rooftop solar. This isn’t just about energy, our political and business hierarchies were created…

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…

A political operative in the UK dies after 4 years of battle against Covid, while his political colleagues doing nothing about the pandemic offer pious homilies. https://t.co/XOuKkctmNc

The blatant, jaw-dropping corruption of it all is staggering. But what’s more staggering? That it’s still even a debate. Electoral politics means popularity can excuse all crimes. https://t.co/gu7J9LZDx6

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

In one sense it is true that governments have played their part with Covid. The emergency response. The gap is we jumped straight from that to ‘personal responsibility’, bypassing all responsibility for business, through WHS.…

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.…

The Trump platform is criminally unhinged. And under populism, none of that matters. Provided you’re popular, you win. We can’t vote our way out of populism. Voting, a popularity contest, can’t fix the problems voting causes.…

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

Populism/popularity is a game of imitative rivalry. if there aren't two meaningful opposing teams, spectators will create them, no matter how hopeless one may be. Polls nearly always show this, how 'the gap closes'. https://t.co/eaawTJHQjG

Of course this angers. That’s why it’s done. We need to learn that this is how populism works. It’s not Left, or Right, or capitalism or any of that nonsense. It’s daily team sports, where you define your team, then unite it by starting…

See how populism works? Invent some fictitious 'bad' team (Leftie snowflakes in this case), oppose them to your team, and the pile-on begins. Most of the time the bad team is a total figment of the imagination, but its purpose is to create…

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

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…

All aspects of our cultures are connected. These are our modern cathedrals, sporting stadiums. Where we assemble in the tens of thousands, to watch two teams slug it out, and to cheer for ours. Our politics is the same, all of our culture…

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

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

The surest sign of complete regulatory capture of democratic governments by vested interests is a range of existential emergencies receiving no action, while governments obsess over inflation. The monetarist fantasy, using money to run…

Governing by counting minorities and majorities is populism. ‘Majority rules’. What is most popular, wins. ‘The public’ in contrast recognises interconnectedness, that societies are only as strong as their weakest links. Let ‘the…

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…

The capture of democracy by ‘the economy’ is easily seen by asking this, about cost of living. Who are we paying, to live? https://t.co/CxHj3exvmM

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…

A measure of the dead-end of our ideas about democracy as everybody debating everything, all day every day, is that we’re STILL sitting here with this pending catastrophe, arguing whether it even exists. We can’t vote or debate our way out…

The entire Republican party is surrendering to the populist tidal wave of Trump. It makes them all Trump’s bitches now, he can make them do anything he likes, like puppets. What Trump doesn’t understand is that populism also eventually…

It puzzles many that cutting tax cuts to a tiny number of rich people can be such a political hot potato. But if you understand society socially, it’s very simple. People aspire to have status. They don’t hate the rich, they want to be…

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…

Trump’s candidacy is our ideas about democracy on trial. If he wins, we need to finally question all of our ideas about what democracy is and how it works. Most of those ideas are a fantasy, which is why it isn’t working.…

Insurance is the privatisation of risk. The abandoning of public-level action on a whole range of serious issues has dumped the damage on the insurance industry, with populist pollies leading the public anger against insurers. The pollies…

Ask your local council if tax cuts will fix this road. It’s not rocket science to do a basic accounting of gaps in public infrastructure and services, and to make that the baseline for all government budgeting. https://t.co/XWxeDrm76n

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…

If we put aside the modern resurgence of Yellow Peril politics, can we honestly say dealing with a US under Trump is better for Australia than dealing with a China under Xi? https://t.co/7NSd6n6lzl

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

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

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

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

Which major party is notable in its absence from this propaganda? If you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas. https://t.co/qvWYVDFRCQ

Apparently also chanting anti-vax slogans. This is where populism always ends. In all of reality being rejected, people anti-everything, except a Great Leader who provides all the cues for transacting their lives. Their beliefs are a…

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…

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…

Our politics has become about attention, not action, about symbolism, not outcomes. Performative outrage, competing for public attention, except there’s no public now. Impotent performance art, righteous and rigid. And as always, just team…

This is what social media does. Creates tribes or teams, where the public used to be. Each generating its own universe of meaning, its own reality. And many still see social media as some sort of democratisation of societies. It’s…

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 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…

The Zambian government pledged to eliminate cholera by 2025. I wonder if they have sneering online trolls mocking the ‘Zero Cholerans’. https://t.co/r91x7QFcPg

Right on cue, politicians leading the assault on the insurance industry, for problems the same politicians cause and do nothing about. https://t.co/DnLcKmfnFE

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 week after a party with 50+ people, in an ordinary residential home, where we made sure all windows and doors were open and multiple HEPA filters were used, there’s not one report of any infection from any attendees.

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

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

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

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

Surely on so many measures the US is now a failed State? Our ideas about democracy, as ‘do whatever you like, provided it’s popular’, are destroying it. Fast, and at a constantly accelerating rate. https://t.co/XgFbFYeFY0

All the idiot supply and demand and price curves that get applied to politics. We'd be much better off applying the economies of scale curve. Showing that scale brings efficiency. The whole rationale for having a public sector, it's a more…

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

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…

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

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

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

How political narratives infect science. The hygiene hypothesis in my understanding isn’t about missing necessary infections, it’s about lack of exposure to microbes that help develop immune function, but not by infection.…

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…

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

Progress would be us watching the melodrama of political ambitions, and saying ‘don’t care, what are you doing to fix actual things?’ And for political journalism to focus on those actual things. It won’t happen. We’re addicted to the team…

Insurance is the last line of risk management. Politicians are doing none at all, and now have the gall to ‘grill’ insurers when they won’t cough up for the climate clusterfuck politicians have made. https://t.co/LKsny4d4dI

The hijacking of public health by politics is nowhere clearer than in the bloody-minded reluctance of expert vaccine advisory bodies to recommend vaccination. Politicians won’t allow an advisory committee to exist now that doesn’t tell…

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?

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

Democracy and markets are opposing forces. Democracy is decisions made for a collective of people. Markets prioritise individuals. It’s why conservatives invented them, to undermine government. Ironically they’re regulated into existence…

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

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

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

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

Covid minimisers have decided to launch an assault today on Covid action using schools and lock-downs as their framing. Here's how Australian schools were performing internationally (PISA), from 20 years before the pandemic. Government…

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…

Between 3 and 4 times as many Australians have died of Covid since introduction of government policy to allow continuous mass infection, as died at Gallipoli. We commemorate the latter, often as an example of ordinary Australians…

Power is power. As in energy is also political power. Today’s power hierarchies are mostly fossil fuel hierarchies. Adding solar to your home is easily the most revolutionary political act you can take. On all issues, including Covid.…

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,…

German farmers want the opposite of Oz farmers, because there government *wants* to bury the cables (opposite of here). Reveals that in both cases it's really about anti-renewables, which in turn is about opposing "Lefties" and "Greenies".…

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…

One of the most common and dangerous myths about democracy is that the majority of voters are a ‘sensible centre’. This ignores the Overton Window idea. You can shift the majority of the population to believe almost anything you like.…

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…

Those mocking clean air movements are fighting against a trend that was underway well before the pandemic. Reality-based politics, people, ignore the hot air from the pay-per-view idiots. https://t.co/BmhUWoouX7 https://t.co/Ev4ikMHQ7k

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…

The only people not taking personal responsibility in this pandemic are political and business leaders. What happens when you privatise a pandemic. https://t.co/17SIy69l4Z

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…

The common populist disdain for the ‘unelected’. Because for populists only the popular i.e. the elected in this case can be true and real. Which is the exact opposite of actual reality. Things that are true are usually deeply unpopular.…

It's still not 100% clear if trying to force Covid to behave in a flu-like pattern is due to the institutional inertia of the Department of Health, which is geared for that already, or political direction. Maybe both.…

Before social media existed, this sort of thing lived in the fringes, if it existed at all, relatively harmless. Now it’s running the world. Unfiltered, snide, nasty, decoupled from basic reality, and politically powerful.…

ATAGI mentioned ‘vaccine fatigue’ yesterday. Getting needles isn’t fatiguing. Australia’s Covid vaccination data shows this supposed fatigue began for many as soon as the vaccine rollout started. It’s not fatigue, it’s anti-vax politics,…

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:…

Most Western nations are flogging a politics of immigration. Just one more to add to their list of reality disconnects. https://t.co/h5RAeIuGwR

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…

‘Capitalism’ and ‘late-stage capitalism’ are popular explanations for 2024. Neither ever existed. Free market politics was feudalism all along, hidden behind econo-babble. The economy has never existed, it was a sleight of hand feudal…

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

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

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

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…

The thrust of this paper is the same perversion of what hybrid immunity means that politicians have sold us. That it’s about making *individuals* super-immune in some way. Hybrid immunity is about preventing transmission, not about making…

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

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

Social infrastructure is crumbling. Because our political model, ‘the economy’, is toxic to community of any kind. A community is not a market. While we keep pretending it is, we’ll keep destroying what’s left of our societies.…

Yep. None of our politicians have a clue how to fix any real problems. So they create fake proxies of these problems, which they then provide fake populist solutions to, designed to energise voters, for votes. Electoral democracy is a…

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

It was in the late-1970s that 'there is no such thing as society' political libertarians took control, including here in London. As society crumbled, corporate entities exploded in size and influence to monetise the void. Their palaces now…

The UK is such a sad contrast of superb public health data and complete political disinterest. https://t.co/LsiqIriZZJ

The government still have an opportunity to listen to Saul Griffith and solve at least 2 problems at once. Electrify homes, subsidies for appliances, solar and batteries. Creates a dramatic shift in cost of living, and also a huge boost to…

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

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…

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

The politics of impossibility pretends Covid is like the tides, unstoppable. It could have been knee-capped inside a few months. Political libertarians were never going to allow us to do that. Just as they haven’t allowed action on climate…

I cheer on BYD every day, for putting a rocket up an entitled car industry and its political minions. Like solar energy, forget all the hot air of 'debate'. The new world is being made right now. Opinions are irrelevant. Reality politics.…

“A class system is developing – the old historic ‘landed gentry’ versus the masses.” Like I often say. 'The economy' isn't a thing, it's a political strategy to dismantle public institutional life, to return us to the feudalism that…

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

When you see it you can’t unsee it. Politicians of every persuasion trapped inside the solemn idiot rituals of ‘the economy’. While Rome burns around them. Not even recognising that it’s the economy that is causing these problems, and also…

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?…

Smart people are so often convinced democracy works by people processing information, as they do. It would never have worked if it had been set up like that. https://t.co/obMPDj4E19

The smartphone and social media have together created a continuous self-referential feedback loop that has replaced reality. Gigs, pandemics, travel, bodies, news etc. - all created now by imitative rivalry inside this self-referential…

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

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

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

The endgame of libertarian politics. The destruction of institutions and government doesn’t usher in a Wonderland of individual freedom. It creates gangs, fighting in the ruins. Humans always create hierarchies. If we destroy civilised…

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

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

Governments doing a modicum of planning and investment was once common. Now only Asia seems to understand that profound social change comes from government planning and investment. Meanwhile we sit and wait for the 'market' to deliver.…

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…

@EricIdle In an age of the reactivation of Yellow Peril politics, what was the inspiration for ‘I Like Chinese’?

1967 photo showing industrial waste pouring in an uncontrolled way into the Cuyahoga River, in Cleveland, Ohio. Short lesson here for us in the speed of essential change, in our case with clean air for Covid and other diseases. 1/5…

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

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

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

It's past time political libertarians found a country without a State, and moved there. Unsurprisingly there are none. And those with the weakest States are violent, poor and diseased. Our community should say enough to our public…

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

Politicians will defend doing nothing against Covid by claiming that people won't support action, that they have 'Covid fatigue'. It's an own-goal to extremism. They mistook extremist strategy for public opinion. https://t.co/8aXnRGmXgA…

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

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

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

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

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…

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…

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

This is a brilliant exploration of another use of network analysis, how to really hurt Putin's oligarchs. Targeting their financial intermediaries is likely to be much more effective than confiscation of their visible wealth. Societies are…

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…

Yep. And politicians will baulk at that if they think it means everywhere, straight away. Target the infection hubs. https://t.co/VC5MEOyie7

Many (including me) are wary of politicians raiding super to avoid public spending on essential services and infrastructure. But in many ways it’s like running a private health insurance system in parallel with a universal health insurance…

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

People who want to use public health methods to defeat Covid petition politicians. Minimisers bypass all of that and create networks. They’re winning by a mile. Victory against Covid, itself networked, will only come from other networks.…

Victory against Covid will be understanding why the GBD was extremely successful, and networks like Indie Sage, OzSAGE etc. weren’t. The instinct to network was sound. But the (failed) strategy used by these other networks was mostly to…

The experience and expertise is out there, it’s just that progressive folk are often completely unaware it even exists. They have a naive view of democracy as run by politicians. It’s not, it’s run by networks. https://t.co/QxyOculAKT

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…

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

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

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

With MMT ideas, if inflation is caused by money being in excess of productive capacity to use it, and taxation is the withdrawal of money from circulation to control distribution, would a better solution to current inflation problems have…

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.…

Anti-vaxxers grin from ear-to-ear every time an Australian politician talks about 'vaccine fatigue'. https://t.co/rUmdeSWvYo

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…

This year’s home insurance renewal bills should be a real hoot for many climate deniers. Pollies will encourage us to blame the insurers, but political refusal to do collective things shifted all the risk management to individuals. As…

Completely house-trained, human shields for a National Cabinet of selfie-taking populist dimwits. https://t.co/ecjyqPIFuR

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…

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…

Social media in my area blaming huge jump in petrol prices recently on the government ‘trying to force us to buy EVs’. Facts don’t change minds. Only catastrophes change minds, usually by killing them.

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…

I guess it’s not surprising MAGAs re-post Russian propaganda without even realising what it is. Looking forward to the Biden v Putin contest in November. https://t.co/zplGSb4jw4

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.…

Politicians and commentators floundering on cost of living. The economic framework we use to understand societies is hopeless. Like the evil Coles/Woolies duopoly. Plays well because it’s team sports. The US has great grocery competition.…

The world is networked. Hubs control most things, and that’s also not bad, it’s economies of scale. Most of the alternatives we’re presented with in consumer choice philosophy and politics are the same hubs, diversifying the brand.…

China is laughing at us, with our Yellow Peril old white man politics. Fabulous analysis at: https://t.co/rMVRXvqaNZ https://t.co/XexONW8pWk

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

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

In reality-based politics, what people say on social media, including on EVs, is mostly hot air. We're still suffering from the idiot idea of 'range anxiety'. Most EVs don't need a servo for most of their driving, they'll charge at home.…

But...but..what about the votes? Politicians cowed by a tiny number of loud and unhinged cookers. Derailing not just this pandemic response, but the entire public health system. https://t.co/0lmYJbUK3t

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…

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

We believe Western societies operate as ‘market economies’. Look at the caravan of market spruikers shout down Albo this week for daring to suggest government invest in manufacturing. But we never have been market economies. /1…

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

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…

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

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…

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…

I’ve had people who should know a lot better be completely oblivious to 1 and 2, arguing (with the deeper political beliefs I’m sure) that our only alternatives are 3 or 4, or mass disease. https://t.co/VJdlpSn7XP

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

Political libertarians affect outrage at identity politics. But identity politics IS political libertarianism. If all collective aspects of human life are removed, the only politics left is of the individual and their identity. That’s the…

This is the fight all governments need to have with all social media platforms. On all issues. Bad faith actors are using these platforms to bypass democracy. They’re libertarian attack weapons. https://t.co/7HzFiKzRrD

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…

Stanley Fish famously said 'there is no such thing as free speech'. All speech involves power, to pretend otherwise is naive. Or motivated. Should government run societies, or social media? Libertarians are winning, huge numbers on all…

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

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…

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.

Part of our mental health crisis is people simply being brutalised by bullshit jobs, and governments outsourcing public services to individuals to pay for, out of their own wallets.

Framing an issue in a way that outrages and enrages, and generates two opposing teams, is not reality. It’s a business model. For political success, and social media profit. Team sports society. 1/2 Now find one public ‘issue’ today that…

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…

The last phase of populism is always militarism. Because popularity politics not only doesn't work, it creates total chaos as sensible, calm, expertise-driven life is dissolved. https://t.co/QwxZgflBga. https://t.co/3UbcKSQn67

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…

Let’s keep attacking our institutions. Therein lies our pathway to Trump. Recent judicial output has been the only sanity we’ve had left in social media society. https://t.co/ffeUnrvaik

The privatisation of collective risk is existentially damaging to insurance as a business model. Politicians make the insurance industry the scapegoats for their own inaction. Social media laps that crap up with its rampant sentimentality.…

It might take this to actually happen in the Land of the Free for people to register that ‘authoritarianism’ is always really just endgame populism. https://t.co/wEBZRbVLda

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

The size of business is a key way we can see how all business is just social too. All of society is. What many don’t realise is how many small businesses fail. And always have. 1/7 https://t.co/Eq8PQmz8Vp https://t.co/HH3Ubc8UcI It’s a…

Comment on public policy 4. Over 25,000 Australians have been killed by direct policy of government on Covid, in less than 3 years. Nothing is being done.

Excellent suggestions here from Zoe Daniel, on regulation of social media. You know it’s the problem when ordinary people here defend Musk and Zuckerberg, and say they don’t trust their own elected governments. https://t.co/2mQGMTnWsN

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

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

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

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…

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

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…

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

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

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

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

Politicians rub their hands together when they see Tweets like this. It's the POLITICIANS who are responsible for this. https://t.co/rtSBwcEqdC

Popular music as pseudo-politics coincided *exactly* with the dismantling of society's public institutions, from the late-60s. It was and still is the soundtrack to our own destruction. To this day we write songs about all the things we…

Labor ‘firming up’ the fossil fuel industry. The gas giants have been basically running the country at least since the time of the Gillard government. https://t.co/6AQHdmIk0b

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

The right thing to do, in politics and everyday life, will never be the most popular thing to do. Unless it’s made into the most popular thing. You make necessary things popular. You lead. You don’t see what’s popular first, and then do…

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

The NSW Government was never going to do anything for Covid, in schools. It won’t even remove unflued gas heaters. Schools are likely the main hubs of Covid infection. This is why. The air in schools is filthy. https://t.co/d5I9a1KHfp

All sides of politics embrace the concept of ‘the economy’. And then wonder why public life is destroyed. The concept of the market, and of the public, are mutually exclusive. The former is violently opposed to the latter.…

Social media at work again. In networks, there is no local or global. Much of our civil unrest is being driven by activists overseas, using social media. In particular the political libertarians. Still agitating against public health, in…

#Insiders Talk to a Gen Z or Millennial if you want to test the utter contempt the young currently have for mainstream political parties. Both the ALP and LNP are representing a demographic in its autumn years. They’ve forgotten that no…

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…

Hilarious story about the total nonsense of political libertarianism. The dominant politics of our time. The politics of adolescent kidults and their obsession with ‘freedom’ from any sort of adult responsibility. h/t somebody whose name I…

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…

The idiocy of electoral politics. And ‘the economy’. Budget surpluses are LNP political framing. Strategy, to gut public investment. The ALP dancing like puppets, to that framing. Aren’t they good boys and girls! Numpties.…

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

We're so house trained by this annual sacred ritual that nobody even questions why government is now a spreadsheet. https://t.co/oE6qJ89ncc

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

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

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…

The job of any leader is to do the things that nobody wants to do. To make the unpopular, popular. If people already want to do things, they don't need to be led to do them. Populism is the cancer in every political system.

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

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

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…

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…

Electoral politics = team sports = no action on anything except votes. https://t.co/jeY3r1g6Uc

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

No government will force house prices down when housing is the population’s leading asset investment. https://t.co/988gJ3q2HZ https://t.co/bh02JFEnml

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…

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

I'd reframe this. Should the social, political and emotional lives of entire societies be transacted and monetised on platforms owned by libertarian tech billionaires? https://t.co/KkdxCvR0u5

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…

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

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.

Political strategists know what they're doing. Just had another person ask me if I'm worried that always wearing a mask will damage my immune system, and make me susceptible to disease. That particular factoid has done splendid work for…

The market is a political fiction, not economic reality. Take government away, and there would be no market. Regulation brings the market into existence and keeps it there. It brings businesses in the market into existence too, through…

Regulatory capture 101. Government 'intervenes' in the market, like it sticks its nose in where it doesn't belong Governments created the market. It's a regulatory entity. This is the substitution of a society by an economy, in plain…

The infected blood scandal in the UK. Long-deserved action. 3000 people died. The UK PM just now saying they want to ensure something like this never happens again. Over 230,000 people have now died of Covid in the UK. By deliberate…

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…

Modern Tories show the essence of populism. Government by cheap slogan, a hijacking of democratic institutions. And zero appetite for time on the Opposition benches or any public policy work. There only for the power, and to destroy the…

AUKUS the same. This is much deeper than politics. Many of these politicians are prosecuting ancient culture wars. https://t.co/KlFqQl3vdv

All politics is really just social life, re-branded. Our major political parties for example are incapable of freeing themselves from the elderly constituents they’ve rewarded so richly, for so long. https://t.co/n2jJmIYkRI…

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…

Wonderful to see politicians grilled on the pressures caused by continuous infection in schools. And how prioritising attendance is what makes the whole situation even worse. https://t.co/LFgKy5Rkpi

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…

The era of 'impartiality' journalism. Where politicians house-train media companies to do nothing but he-said/she-said journalism, turning journalists into party political stenographers, publicising their fatuous ideologies.…

‘Impartiality’ is political strategy to neuter journalism. It literally forces journalism to be nothing more than an additional PR arm of political parties. ‘He said, she said’ journalism, with no analysis. https://t.co/AO3skLRJ6R

If only journalists would just repeat the spin politicians vomit every day, 'impartially'. https://t.co/SJLkfsJ2gm

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…

Society is a whole collection of material problems that have material solutions. Most of what we do politically has no impact on those problems. It’s social status team sports played using those material problems as a stadium. There is no…

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

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

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,…

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…

The bullshit of ‘free trade’ politics. Imposing tariffs on Chinese cars because China ‘subsidises’ the industry. Give us a fucking break. The same nations are shopfronts for fossil fuel businesses, and have been for decades. Massive…

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

We’re not more ‘polarised’. The business of everyday life continues as it always does. The redundant electoral layer of democracy is just infected with team sports. The Superbowl invaded government, that’s all. Social media was the main…

Biden being old is seen as a massive liability. Trump being a convicted felon who led an insurrection? Meh. If you look you’ll see adolescence as the model of adult society, reinforced by social media and its economy of likes. Being old is…

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

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

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

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

The penny is dropping that populism is the real enemy. And that 'the market' (a social fantasy, no humans act in that way, they act in teams) is a hopeless way forward. https://t.co/SBZmWBSEjl

The man who stacked the Supreme Court says the US justice system has been politicised. If you go with 'whatever is most popular wins', this is where you will always end up. Popularity even determines reality itself. We 'live with'…

"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…

I'm seriously curious what the staff of our State public health departments make of this ongoing orgy of infections. Because we live in 'open and free' democracies, they're not allowed to say. https://t.co/4V5xIuoLmw

Now we just need them to demand (not plead) that government put Covid controls into schools. It's a friggin' union, ffs. 'Pleading'. https://t.co/FwF2lD0K0S

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

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

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

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…

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

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

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…

The insight that drives ‘flooding the zone with shit’ politics. Do not engage with the shit. https://t.co/UkwgeeHyMM

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

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

And about 70% of the only 38.5% of internet traffic that is human, is streaming video. The internet was conceived as a many-to-many communication system. Like our politics, it ignored basic human social behaviour. And malicious activity…

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

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

Windows into populism. People don’t desire things, they desire what other people desire. It’s a social sorting process, to create teams and hierarchies. This is what fads and fashions are. Interior design, as an example. 1/6…

‘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…

“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.

The emptiness of our politics is easily seen by asking what the ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ way of fixing this might be. Or the ‘Centre’ way. https://t.co/XP8pJWffBC

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…

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…

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

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

Conservative parties swapped public policy for populist slogans. Those slogans have now come to life as standalone populist parties, stealing conservative power. https://t.co/DTf2j4752l https://t.co/KKnEpzHCBL

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…

#Insiders correctly noting that climate change politics is easier when the whole country is on fire. Only catastrophes shift societies in meaningful ways. Without them, it’s just team sports.

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.…

Covid minimisers and their followers always use the same argument to say the pandemic is over. ‘Nobody is paying any attention to it.’ This is a very important window into the dynamics of our situation. /1 You can see clearly that their…

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…

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

My advice on anti-vaxers and other cookers is to just block them. Immediately. ‘Flooding the zone with shit’ politics is about them being able to tie you in knots of meaningless gibberish, disguised as conversation. ‘We need to discuss’ is…

We’re dominated by anti-State ‘small government’ politics. The idea that a ‘market’ of competing individuals will always be the efficient way to carry out social transactions. An ‘economy’, replacing a society. Why this is bananas. /1…

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

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.…

Coalition of free market fundamentalists launches nuclear building program styled on the Soviets. The ridiculous rabbit holes populist politics takes us down. #auspol https://t.co/neE9lXSDfv https://t.co/YmzICk5awg

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

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

One of the weirdest manipulations in the energy debates is the idea of 'baseload power'. The public has been led to believe this means the minimum amount of supply the energy grid needs to be able to supply, 24 hours per day. That's not…

If you’re not questioning the existence of ‘the economy’, rather than just trying to re-purpose it, you’re living inside a fantasy. ‘The economy’ and its ‘market’ is just society stripped of government. Exactly why it was invented, as an…

Summarises everything that makes Australian nuclear a total fantasy. A world where the most popular politician once advised rinsing lungs with disinfectant, to kill Covid. We’re not seeing that popularity (electoral) politics is the…

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

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

But they don’t stand together. Because groups of people never self-organise. They are led. 5% lead the 95%. It’s belief in ‘the people’ that makes progressive politics lose, over and over again. https://t.co/YsJTadkma4

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

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

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…

One of the most popular groups running for local government in my area openly describes Aboriginal Australians as primitives, who were ripe for colonisation. It was only WW1 and 2 that suppressed the dumb, violent get-rich-quick settler…

The other side of this picture is the astronomical amount of wasted time government officials have to spend satisfying the conspiratorial fantasies of many FOI requests. And many are never satisfied. It's a libertarian attack strategy, to…

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…

This is populism, not democracy. ‘Majority wins’. Democracy is government for all, including minorities. https://t.co/ZuZWweCNGg

Every essential decision bogged down in social media-driven adolescent whining about freedom and identity. Governments now forced to act. What’s at stake is infinitely more dangerous than any war. They need to act as if we’re at war.…

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

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

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

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

Clinton sat Trump on his arse in debates. He still won. The underlying *social* framework of American politics is Pater familias. From the Romans. The oldest male heading a household, granted ultimate autocratic power.…

The US is approaching end-stage Restoration of a monarchy. King Trump. This is huge, gutting what little regulatory power institutions had left. The post-war shift to public-centred governance. Old hierarchies have restored their own…

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…

Check-in at the end of 2024, as to whether this orgy of voting has made one single difference to fixing any of our problems. Voting is causing the problems. Populism. Lots of voting will just make it all worse. https://t.co/MWEalBgBC6…

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…

Endgame populism continuing. Now the ‘king’ is above the law. We’re pre-Magna Carta now. https://t.co/a6wRSLp7KB

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

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

The decision opens the door for Biden to 'officially' do whatever he likes right now, with immunity from future prosecution? Imagine that. https://t.co/RE8G3krbFB

Given that ordinary people outnumber 'elites' many times over, it's notable that democracy is such a hard sell. Half the world's democracies are in decline. Means our ideas are wrong. https://t.co/r4yeLV6mbn https://t.co/N2Z82oHstN

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…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you choose your social life over your health, will your friends be with you through the long years of chronic illness? Or will they party on without you? Sufferers of chronic disease I’ve met are some of the loneliest people on the…

‘Countries’ didn’t do this. Their institutions did. Institutions their populist politicians have now knee-capped. https://t.co/WHY5x76gTu

Note to self. Posting deeply unpopular things on a platform that runs on populism, will create some push-back.

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.…

The mythology (the ‘bait’ in its bait-and-switch) of social media, is that it’s like the world’s conversation. Everybody talking to everybody else. Except it isn’t. The same hierarchical structure shapes those conversations as exist off…

Teslas are brilliant engineering. This is the sort of performative politics social media has turned the world into. The world needs every EV it can put on the roads. https://t.co/Ig40hz2Rm4

All of our greatest problems are spelled out with great clarity here, every day. Refracted through the finest minds. And then...nothing. The same problems are still here the next day. That's the point. Of these platforms. To bury action in…

“Y’all Masking”? That ‘y’all’. Covid minimisers won by portraying Covid as everywhere, all of the time. The hashtag shares the framing. Covid isn’t everywhere. It’s bred in highly localised hubs (mostly schools), and transmitted through…

I’ve seen multiple people here say ‘I’d never buy a Tesla now, because of Elon.’ They say this on a platform owned by Elon. They won’t leave the platform. yesterday I shared research that said people would rather give up their car, than…

The political philosophy of the entire IT industry is political libertarianism. It builds its products to implement those beliefs. You won’t find many who will back government over social media or IT more generally. They’re winning.…

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

The value of X is that powerful people are on it. The reality is that they employ staff to do most of their Tweeting, and rarely engage themselves. Those like Trump who do engage are showing us that if they DO engage, it’s a disaster. And…

I reckon with that list of hashtags, Trump doesn’t stand a chance. https://t.co/hJkfRJZWFu

As a plane goes down, would all the passengers talking to one another right the descent? Or hashtags like PullUp, or SaveUs? The idea that democracy is everybody talking to everybody else, all the time, is really just ‘flooding the zone…

Defenders of social media as a dominant social space need to recognise that the overriding reason politicians won’t touch Covid action now, is their terror of re-energising the SM-organised cookers from earlier in the pandemic.…

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

This event should be a wake-up call to what social media-driven culture is doing to us. Who is Trump ‘fighting’? You can see how his entire political success is to turn everything into a fight. This is the team sports I Tweet about. Where…

All of this tragic nonsense destroying democracies begins and ends in the medium we use to transact our social lives now. https://t.co/VkFcwexy9j

I tend to see long-game things in daily news. The weekend for example cemented in my own mind anyway that China will now lead the world. The US is becoming a circus, and Trump loves to fawn over foreign dictators anyway, so what's to stop…

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

People are not so much passive or obedient, as imitative. We all imitate or emulate those we admire. We don’t have time to do everything for ourselves, so we have to choose others to follow. And the social media age doesn’t ’limit 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 thing about electoral democracy is: voters don't even like it. They will back their team, but increasingly they know that none of the teams achieve much at all. Because they can't. Popularity governance and practical outcomes are…

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

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

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

People will allow a decade or more of social collapse, if it doesn’t impact their lifestyle and status. They categorically won’t allow a party that same length of time to fix their collapse in lifestyle and status. Societies are social,…

From the 1970s, the push was on to reverse the post-war emphasis on collective good. A mystery for some is why conservative politicians and their ‘economy’ have dominated this same period, when their policies are doing the reversing. It’s…

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…

Quos Deus vult perdere, prius dementat. (Those whom God wishes to destroy, he first deprives of reason.) Karma is coming for populism. It’s a long road, but reality always wins. Only reason puts you in touch with it. Republicans have now…

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

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

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

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…

There’s always excitement in populism when the teams shift, particularly the leaders of teams. Only a few weeks ago this excitement was the UK. How’s that going? https://t.co/ZzzCzPlkHz

The bait of SM was offering the public ways to ‘connect’. The switch is using those connections to then take over existing industries, and vacuum up their revenue. Social media is a bait-and-switch. Many wallow in the bait, not seeing the…

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…

A colleague has just had her first baby. She’s very excited to bring it to the office on Friday to meet everybody. Two people in that office currently have walking pneumonia. This is the tragedy of politicians destroying public health.…

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

‘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…

The political concept of ‘the vulnerable’. You can’t ring-fence groups in that way. This isn’t an argument about fairness. It’s about logistics. You allow the weakest links to break, the whole lot comes tumbling down. Economies (really…

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,…

For decades there have been calls for emergency strong action by governments, on climate change. One government is actually doing it. ‘The economy’ in the West is horrified. Which shows its true function. https://t.co/Nrc32AtiwA…

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…

If you want a model for how to approach reality politics, actuarial work is up there. https://t.co/4iEAeSyjKw

An astonishing take. Trump was the Twitter President. https://t.co/EzfVkYlcJQ https://t.co/yxlYGM8Fez

A longstanding example of toxic populism. List all the scientific reasons to get rid of Daylight Saving, and the response is always the same. “But I like it.” That’s all that’s needed for victory, under populism. https://t.co/hfGDheQt5M

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

It’s nearly 3 months since this announcement. When I check the NSW Government page, it says the two levels of government are still figuring out how to pay it. https://t.co/Gw1WsqFcJ4

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…

It irritates populist societies to be told that even their deepest truths are really just popularity contests. That the truth is the social hierarchy that is dominant. Einstein went on to do the same thing to Bohr and quantum mechanics.…

Example of how the imitative rivalry of social media (team sports) loops back into everyday life. Posts on social media platforms about EVs attract a conga line of rabid ICE fans, who pile-on with mockery and derision. They could just do…

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…