Staff member turned up to work sick yesterday. It was an insight into ‘living with’ infection culture.
I told them to go home. ‘No, I’m fine, I have too much to do.’
Then others in the office approached me in private to ask me to make them go home.
/1
These others are the same people who most embrace the ‘living with’ infection culture that started during Covid.
In front of others they boast and bluster about how ‘you have to live your life’, and mock people in masks etc.
/2
It’s a show. The fear at catching Covid in particular is there under the surface. They’ve had several years now of being pummelled by infections of various kinds.
One who asked me in private to make the sick staff member go home was desperate, they have no more sick leave.
/3
Others who affect total casual indifference to Covid have been seen emptying whole cans of Glen-20 antiseptic spray into the air and onto furniture when a person with known Covid left to go home, sick.
/4
Living with Covid is a political lie that worked because it cynically tapped into some basics of human behaviour.
The bastards who came up with it knew that the most basic human behaviour is to imitate others, to maintain social status and identity.
/5
That ‘peer pressure’ would ensure this outrageous piece of public health bullshit would self-regulate, if this perverse behaviour could be made to ‘trend’.
Most importantly, they appealed to ideas of ‘the people’, always an indication that lies and power games are in play.
/6
Claiming that ‘people would no longer support public health action’. Or that ‘the community’ was over it.
Groups of people never have agency in that way. Anybody who says they do is trying to lead a change to something, while attributing it to all of us.
/7
By leaving public health to the ‘personal responsibility’ of the public doing it itself, it cut the head off public health itself.
Public health ceases to exist, unless it’s led. Like anything humans do, all action and change must be led.
/8
That’s what then gets imitated, to create mass action. It ‘goes viral’. Social imitation is what creates all collective behaviour.
These cynical bastards knew that by leading a leaderless public health, there would be no more public health.
/9
Instead we ended up with a libertarian-led anti-public health, not a ‘freedom’ movement of the public taking control.
All change is led. Supposed freedom movements are also led, under cover of drivel about the people running the show.
/10
Anyway, I had no intention of this sick staff member remaining, unlike other managers I’ve seen who just go along with the living with nonsense, for a quiet life.
As an ex-school teacher I know people will pretend to be behind things they actually secretly fear and hate.
/11
That’s your job, as a teacher or manager. To lead. I told the employee this wasn’t a negotiation, it was an order. Go home, it wasn’t just about their health, it was about everybody else’s.
They were relieved, as was everybody in the office.
/12
Not one of them would have openly said that, in front of others. They would have continued the farce of pretending everybody was having a rollicking good time, infecting each other to various levels of shocking health.
You have to lead, for everybody’s sake.
/end
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So often even the most committed to public health have told me they eventually gave up fighting Covid because they didn’t want to deny themselves or their families a proper life.
Another window into kidult culture. The assumptions around sociality.
/1
The people who say that are part of a majority who feel it. That a proper life is a social life. One with total freedom of association, lots of mixing with other people, lots of travel and displacement.
I don’t think we see how much that almost defines kidult culture.
/2
I’ve Tweeted many times how sociality is violence. These assumptions we have that somehow sociality *is* the most full and lived life are actually both bizarre and dangerous.
Sociality is violence because imitative rivalry is the basis of all civilisation. RIVALRY.
/3
The genius of Australia is invisible to all of the political categories developed mostly in Europe and applied globally. All of the -isms: capitalism, socialism, liberalism, communism etc.
Australia is none of those things. And that’s why it works. So what is it?
/1
Probably more by accident than by design, but also intriguingly possibly via osmosis with its Indigenous population, Australian life is centred around none of the social groupings that make up traditional ‘politics’, like class.
Australian life is created around community.
/2
Australia is communitarian. That sounds a lovely warm hugs thing to be, but it deserves a more rigorous understanding.
The atomic unit of Australian society is the community. The interactions of a wide diversity of people, in their communities.
/3
Because everything is a crusade today, trying to assess the chronic long-term impacts of SC2 by looking at the progression of HIV was heavily frowned upon, because diseases are now social movements.
But the question remains. Chronic infection follows patterns.
/1
Of course what SC2 does to the immune system may be entirely different to what HIV does to it. That’s NOT the question.
The question is - what is SC2 doing in *its* ‘clinical latency’ period, right now? Do we know? Some are trying to figure it out.
/2
The comparison is about the clinical latency period. And SC2 is already not very latent. ‘Long Covid’ tells us that. It’s not waiting years to fuck with us.
If we’d used the same acute impact filters for HIV that we use for SC2?
I can promise you the entire world will appear fundamentally differently, with this one reframing.
The battles and debates of our adult lives are not the adult world. They’re us trapped in a permanent childhood. How this happened is actually very simple.
/1
In the 19th century and before, there was no real space or culture for children. They were just little adults, sharing life and work in the adult world.
Here they are, you can see it directly with your own eyes. Human life was just adult life.
/2
And then the thing happened, which turned our culture upside down and inside out. We invented compulsory, universal schooling.
And that created a ‘child’, for the first time. Suddenly our world had adults *and* children.
Our societies as a whole are suffering from dysautonomia. This isn’t just an analogy. Like bodies, societies are far too complex to be consciously controlled in most of what they need to do, to operate.
They operate via an autonomic set of social processes.
/1
Our social autonomic nervous system is our institutions. They are what evolves over time - nobody consciously creates them - to regulate how our society operates.
This was always Burke’s point. Our customs, traditions - our institutions - are what run societies.
/2
No individual creates customs and traditions, institutions. They evolve over time in response to threats.
The staggering complexity of a society, like a body, is way beyond any individual or group to control and run.
/3