Henry Madison Profile picture
Oct 19 6 tweets 2 min read
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 responsibility on their own part. /1 #covid19aus
Look at this rubbish from NSW: "All students, staff and visitors to school sites are strongly encouraged to wear a mask, particularly when indoors or when physical distancing is not possible." The ludicrous situation where there's a known significant health risk to staff and.../2
...students, but the best NSW Health can do is 'encourage' some action against it, because their political libertarian masters are offended by basic public health action. There has to be consequences for this deliberate infection of the entire community, and for the .../3
...political hijacking of centuries-old public health procedures. CHOs demoted so that populist Premiers can take control of public health, to ensure their own electoral success. A National Cabinet that trashed all of the principles of federalism,.../4
...has no agenda papers and functions as a decoupling mechanism between leaders and their State health departments. All of this outrageous corruption, every last bit of it, is driven by populism. By the focus on winning elections above any public duty. These ex-student.../5
...politician zealot-halfwits have hijacked our societies and use them as playthings in their pathetic ideological undergraduate debating games. While we continue to believe popularity is a test of competence, nothing can or will be done. /end

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More from @RageSheen

Oct 19
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 which could save us from collapse. /1 Image
The Chinese imperial examination was the model of our own civil/public services. The broader idea here is to find expertise and talent and utilise it towards the functioning of society itself. To act as a counterweight to imperial authority, which historically proved unable…/2… Image
…to maintain social functioning or stability. A mechanism to counter hereditary aristocracy with ‘scholar-bureaucrats’. Note that the Chinese saw civil service staff as scholars, expertise was treasured, these weren’t merely scribes to the emperors. And you can still see…/3
Read 17 tweets
Oct 18
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 unelected officials do. /1
Yesterday’s discussion (actually at least 6 months’ old, but social attention waxes and wanes - it ‘trends’) was mostly about the top 5% of the Department of Health’s own Medicare pyramid of compliance. All public programs have this sort of compliance mechanism built in. /2
Or at least the ones populist politicians aren’t allowed near, do. (Populist politicians sometimes try to turn the compliance into ‘robo’-driven public administration.) Why I’m so tired of populist politics, the steps to address compliance issues are already in the work…/3
Read 9 tweets
Oct 17
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 facts, again, for most of that short time,…/1
…we didn’t toil much. All that white space. I’ve come to learn that toil here mostly means ‘weren’t allowed to hop on planes and travel’. What precious darlings we are, the awful humanity of denied recreational flight. Here’s a list of things many are actually tired of, that…/2
…have gone on at least 10 years, often 20-30, or even more.

- being grossly underpaid
- having to pay astronomical amounts out of our own pockets in a universal health care system
- having to fight to get our kids a decent education without taking out a 2nd mortgage…/3
Read 9 tweets
Oct 15
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 knew nothing about. /1 Image
We’ve forgotten that model, populism now makes us think the entire population has to become expert at something to act in appropriate ways. We’re terrified of a hierarchy of expertise, populism makes us think that’s elitist. Horseshit. You won’t find a single area of life…/2 Image
…where there isn’t a hierarchy of good and bad. We don’t get on a plane and all vote on what the pilot should do next. This is the real cancer of populism, yes I Tweet about it a lot. The destruction of generations of expertise, embedded in public institutions. It’s not even…/3 Image
Read 7 tweets
Oct 15
Listened to a piece on ABC Radio this week about building ventilation. @DrPieterPeach made a guest cameo. Innes Willox said new buildings could factor in better ventilation, but it can be a very difficult task for old buildings. And that vaccination and individuals staying…/1
…home when sick are the best way forward. I’d hope business could do a lot better than that, not least because WHS and disability law require them to. I think it was @RobynSchofield3 who made the excellent point in the same story that when we turn on a tap in a building,…/2
…we expect the water to be clean and drinkable. Building air should be exactly the same, healthy air, as Robyn said, we all breathe, we can’t not. As Pieter’s work has shown, you can also retrofit older buildings with portable purifiers for less than the catering costs at…/3
Read 4 tweets
Oct 14
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 apocalyptic mass stupidity and delusion. But,…/1
…the good news is, it isn’t that at all. 5% or less of any group, at whatever scale, actually determines the direction the other 95+% of people will follow. You just have to target that 5%, to fix the problem. Not the 95%. Conservatives, themselves historically vastly…/2
…outnumbered by working people, know this very well. They know to target the leaders of movements that oppose them, they ignore things like mass protests. It’s what their tabloid media empires were actually set up to do. We could easily regulate to shut down most of the 5%…/3
Read 4 tweets

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