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Henry Madison

@RageSheen

Dec 12

If you’re an expert who understands the disaster of Covid, arguing the facts is a dead-end. Societies run using social rules, not facts. You have to interrupt the social conformity process. Your current fact-based resistance only reinforces the existing tribal groupings. /1

It marks you out as part of an opposing group of some kind, to the Covid minimisers. It’s the oil in the whole machine. Society is much more like football than like science (and even science is much more like football than like science). It’s competing teams, quite literally. /2

So how do we shift this? It’s not about replacing social conformity with facts, social conformity IS society. It’s what holds it together, at every scale, from schoolyard groups, to workplaces, research teams, sporting clubs etc. /3

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Henry Madison

@RageSheen

Dec 7

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 destroyed it. /1

The acute phase of neoliberalism feels great, it's euphoric. Everything is flogged off and the proceeds are used to create rivers of budget gold, which then fund tens of billions in election bribes. Personal debt skyrockets as the flood of money inspires dreams of riches. /2

Then you arrive at long neoliberalism. Where the money has all evaporated, together with all of the collective institutions that are what society actually is. The things the neolibs sell and dismantle. Suddenly everything from plagues to weather catastrophes meet no response. /3

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Henry Madison

@RageSheen

Nov 21

https://twitter.com/sciencecohen/status/1594759914357932038

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 balance. A short thread. /1

https://twitter.com/sciencecohen/status/1594759914357932038

Try engaging in conversation with anybody of international fame, on Twitter. Nearly always you’ll fail, not because they’re bad people, but because with hundreds of thousands or millions of followers, they have to prioritise. Many openly claim they never read any comments,…/2

…it’s unmanageable. And it is, they’re right. The problem is our core belief, that society changes by everybody talking to everybody else, ‘the people’ driving change. That never happens, because it can’t physically happen. Conversation IS the engine room of all change, but…/3

Read 16 tweets

Henry Madison

@RageSheen

Nov 11

https://twitter.com/EricTopol/status/1590738929225175040

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 we’re to survive. /1

https://twitter.com/EricTopol/status/1590738929225175040

Because we all managed to struggle on, despite our health care and education and transport and everything else being sold off to the highest bidder and then used to enrich the buyers. We all got poorer and the outcomes in all of these areas declined. But society limped on. /2

Now we’ve reached a genuinely existential tipping point. Because we’ve privatised a pandemic. Across the world, entire populations are having forced infection and re-infection, in perpetuity, to satisfy this political belief system. Crumbling public life is joined by…/3

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Henry Madison

@RageSheen

Nov 11

I love the twaddle of modern economics. Inflation for example is often explained as being the result of insufficient supply to meet high demand. Like that magically puts prices up. Of course the seller in that situation can say, 'sorry this is the last one I have.' /1

And sell it for the same price as all the others. But instead they force all the people who want it to bid against each other, and then sell it to the highest bidder. They could have just drawn lots. But easier to use extortion instead, and call it 'supply and demand'. /2

That's what modern economics is, techno-twaddle rationalising the basest human behaviour. I had somebody tell me this morning that our current inflation is due to lockdowns. (Is there anything lockdowns can't do?) /3

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Henry Madison

@RageSheen

Nov 8

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: minnpost.com/macro-micro-mi…)

US data, but not dissimilar to anywhere in the developed world. Since WW2, a huge shift in labour from actually building things, towards providing services. 'To go into service' used to mean being a servant. I don't think we connect a 'services economy' with servitude. /2

But we should, it's just a modernised terminology for the same process. Some of this is us getting more efficient at production and manufacturing, because of technology. But much more it's about trying to redress falling profit margins after the enormous boom in consumer.../3

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