On discrimination and ableism.

As the lockdown lifted in NSW, many stores and cafes took to their social media feeds to announce their intentions. 

Many decided to only open their doors fully after December the 1st, when the state vaccination rate reaches 90% (now looking like 95%). 

The first of many such announcements was from a local cafe and health food store, on Instagram, a beige screenshot of the ocean with a beautifully composed homily about light, spirit and wellness and kindness. Love everyone, it intoned.

This is Instagram speak for, ‘We won’t be opening our doors if we can only let the vaccinated in’. 

Some are more direct; ‘We do not discriminate against anyone, regardless of their beliefs. All are welcome here. We won’t be opening until December 1st”.

Laudable sentiments. No one likes to think of themselves as discriminating against people, especially not those who wear crystals. 

My dear friend has stage 4 cancer. She is vaccinated, but it is unlikely to have had much of an impact. Her family engages with the world. Her partner works in a shop, her kids go to school. Her family members need to work and go to school, and obviously, there is still risk, but the risk of passing Covid on is much smaller if there’s a high rate of vaccination.  

To someone with cancer, or a disability that impacts their immunity, shops that say, ‘We don’t discriminate against anyone’ are actually saying, ‘….except you, weaklings. We don’t give a fuck about you at all and if we’re honest, you probably brought your conditions on yourself. Have some potentiated dried bees’ testes!’

This position, where you assume that everyone is well and that vaccination only impacts on the person who chooses to be vaccinated, is the very definition of ableism. Making self-aggrandising comments about your ‘commitment to non discrimination’ gives the middle finger to those people who have experienced the most discrimination in their lives – disabled people. 

I have and will continue to boycott local places that cheerfully announce their lack of accumulated fucks for the most vulnerable in society. Just like them, I will discriminate.

Burning Person

In my ‘write something every day’ challenge, I’ve sat down and blurted out a stream of consciousness each day. I realise, as a writing exercise, that this is the intellectual equivalent of endlessly brushing my hair.

But, it did get me thinking about the last time I did this – many years ago. I had a wee read of these notes this morning. Some are banal but others are moderately interesting.

Almost 15 years ago I was employed as a researcher for a project run through the Department of Anthropology at UCLA, examining the social practices of attendees at Burning Man, a huge, annual festival/fuck-fest in the Nevada desert.

At the time I simply turned over my notes to the head of the research team, a tiny, beautifully formed Canadian chap who lived on a sailing trapeze in the top of a warehouse in the Mission District. It was not my project and not appropriate for me to share the research data but I wrote and kept my own observations as I went. I returned to Australia a few months later and never thought much more about it.

I think, over the next few days, I might excavate some of these snippets and edit them for clarity, and post them.

Nostalgic Drivel

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  Grainy picture, owing to speeds in excess of Mach one.

I thought I would write something about bushfires today, as we find ourselves on the cusp of a wet, La Nina summer. Given our previous experiences however, I felt like I should probably do a good job of it. So, I’ll write about the Mark One Escort instead.

My first car was a Mark 1 Escort. It was old when I bought it, and, I remember, cost $600, which was an outrageous sum of money. I think I was about 16 when I bought it. I’d been driving for a couple of years, but couldn’t get a driver’s licence. The rules changed in the early 90s. For some inexplicable reason, the New Zealand government had decided that 15 year olds weaving through cattle and deer on slick tyres in torrential rain, while repositioning the straw on a carton of ZAP with surgical precision required a touch more expertise than ticking 50% of questions on a multi-guess test.

This squeamishness led to an outrageous attack on personal sovereignty – the three stage driver’s licence. I can’t remember the details, but the first step was answering a 20 question ‘scratchie’ test at the local police station.

I had been driving for a couple of years by the time I sat the test, (as had most of my mates). The new licence restrictions might well have been appended with, ‘……in and around town’.

But, I studied up and made the appointment, nervously sitting in a small office at the local police station. The test was simple and I answered each question correctly. I passed the test to the police officer sitting opposite me. He didn’t look at it, rather, he took a long drag on his ciggie and blew the smoke in my face,

“Fail”.

I was stunned. Maybe he’d been watching me do the test and thought I’d failed? I paid the $20 and made another appointment in a week.

The following week I trundled into the police station, again. And again, the same officer sat in the room with me, blowing B&H Gold into my face,

“Fail”.

After the third attempt I realised I was never going to get a learner licence, so I just gave up and drove without one, albeit after an initial period of riding my motorbike to work, because no-one really needed licence for a motorbike.

It was a few years later that I discovered that the cop, like most people in our small town, hated my Dad, to the extent that he’d flown low over his house in a chopper and blasted the washing on the line with a .308.

And with that, I realise I’ve said nothing about the car, and a lot about corrupt West Coast police.

I had big plans for the Escort. It was a beguiling creature, with its thin, black steering wheel, and overpowering smell of warm oil, seeped into the rough stubble of carpet. Mine was white, with patches of pink bog. I planned to modify the transmission tunnel and drop a 2 litre into it, with a machined cam, such was the modest fabulism of the 90s petrol head. What I ended up doing was building a simple transistor assisted ignition kit so the bloody thing would start in the morning and replaced the wiper blades. I don’t even remember what happened to the Escort, which is odd, because I remember all the cars I’ve owned since (quite an impressive procession of shit-boxes over the years), but the details of the Escort escape me. I thought I’d perhaps given it to a friend, but then I realised that I had another car following the Escort, (which I won’t even discuss because it was so outrageously shit, I’m still angry about it) and I can’t remember what happened to that thing either. It had hydro-elastic suspension. I’m still scarred.

And with that, I leave today’s entry.

Mumorialising

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Typical West Coast kitchen.

I lost another school friend over the weekend. While some in my current circle lament the loss of connections to those who’ve ‘gone down the rabbit hole’ of conspiracy theories, the distinguished alumni of my high school must contend with actually losing people, for real.

There is nothing as sobering as the tally of friends lost in midlife. I’m 45, and without putting too much thought into it, I think I can honestly say that all the friends I’ve lost already are friends from high school. It’s a real testament to the socio economic indices that correlate strongly with scruffiness. Certainly, there’s a bit of drug and alcohol in the mix, but there are also the lifetime effects of poverty; a general state of ill health that predisposes to inflammation and general fuckery. Everything from floppy heart valves from rheumatic fever to neglected dental abscesses, to COPD from coal smoke and endless chest infections. An older resident once told me that everyone was half mad from mercury poisoning (the residue of gold mining, flowing into the water catchment). When I moved to the city I distinctly remember how strange it was to be in a large group of people without listening to endless coughing. I’ve written a little about this before.

A google search for my hometown reveals stunning misty landscapes, dense bush and steep cliffs, skirted by skerricks of flat, green land, populated by a few houses, receding into the damp scrub. It’s romantic and a little eerie. Of course, the reason for such untouched beauty is that there’s no-one left to do the touching. Those with bucolic notions should ground-truth the marketing with a quick survey of Trademe property photos, each grimy bedroom looking like all that’s missing is a selection of jaunty little crime scene tags.

My high school serviced a poor demographic. Anyone with any money or connections left as soon as they could, and the area self-selected for people who ‘liked to be on their own’, a euphemistic expression for, ‘teeming with wild-eyed lunatics and a surfeit of both homemade shotgun cartridges and liquor’.

And there were different ways of being poor, ways of living that are easily elided by the outside eye.

To be sure, many of those living in town were categorically living on the juice of society’s bin- liner – a very day to day existence. I suppose this is the image of poverty that we’re all familiar with. But, what always interested me were the people who felt they had chosen a life on their own terms, often living on the outskirts of town, or in smaller settlements in the bush, hunting and fishing and generally getting by without much ‘outside’ interference. Usually, they were living a more remote life by necessity – the inability to ‘work well in a team’. It’s a personality trait I am sympathetic to.

By definition, I suppose these people were ‘poor’ as well, but they seemed wealthy in their own way. I don’t want to romanticise this life too much – there’s a lot of be said for being able to go to the dentist (I remember one friend pulling out his own infected tooth with a teaspoon. I’d never seen so much blood). And, certainly there were some with really difficult and troubling mental illnesses – poorly managed schizophrenia for instance. But, compared to rotting away in a little unit in town, sweating away under a polar fleece blanket and living on half scoops of chips and the odd rigger, it was a much more preferable lifestyle option.

Perhaps it’s quite different now. I left many years ago and have never returned. I imagine (hopefully) that it has become easier to ‘live on one’s own terms’ in the bush, with the availability of the internet and cheap Honda generators. Maybe.

On the difference between being and doing

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Pistol River, Oregon. The grainyness is attributable to every atom of sand being blown sideways at a freezing 40 knots. Those people in the foreground are leftover from a storm in 1976.

Almost exactly but not quite ten hundred and a half years ago, I was living in the Bay Area, California. I’ve realised, since I am trying to write something every day, how much of my daily observations are informed by previous experiences. And so; California. My time in NorCal was oriented largely around kitesurfing, as was my want at the time. During one summer I travelled up the PNW coast in a rapidly disintegrating van (a theme that has punctuated my life like a recurring case of the shingles), to Hood River, Oregon. 

Perhaps I’ll write more about those experiences at some point, but I’m reminded today of being offered a job teaching kitesurfing, in San Francisco, the epicentre of extremely expensive and well educated brains tucked inside ridiculously thin skulls. The model was simple – I would work for cash in hand, use the kite school’s equipment and infrastructure to teach people to do something that is easier than driving a car, but with a more consequential and vastly wetter learning curve. 

I declined. I was in the US legally, with long-as-you like residency (can’t recall its real name) but I did not have a work permit. Perhaps more importantly, I did not have any sort of insurance. The school did not seem to think this was a limiting factor, but I was nervous. The scale and scope of kiteboarding injuries makes 17th century Caribbean piracy look like a wellbeing check-in session on Zoom (although personally I’d prefer the former). I’d only recently watched a young man get dragged sideways into a carpark bollard, shearing his pelvis cleanly in two, the harness holding him together like a rolled roast. Or, the chap at Oostvoorne, in the Netherlands, who snapped his neck hitting the water from an unseemly height. 

I could just imagine stage-managing some kind of salt-water flensing and being subsequently sued for both kidneys. When we talk about predatory labour practices this isn’t the kind of thing that springs to mind, but in a litigious environment like California, the potential fleecings are terrifying. Like everyone, I periodically assess the odd poor decision I’ve made along the way, but it’s good to also keep in mind the rare moments of perspicacity.  

This puts me in mind of another peculiar trend I discovered while living in the US; egg harvesting. A good friend, Stanford educated, with enormous student loans, was considering ‘donating’ her eggs. Tall, blond, healthy and in possession of a Masters degree from Stanford, she breezily informed me that her eggs would attract around a $100k price tag. Egg ‘donating’ was casually discussed and seriously undertaken, although not by anyone I knew closely. One ‘cycle’ would pay almost all of one’s student debt. That’s a significant inducement to young graduates, many of whom have had to work as (unpaid) interns in their holidays. For these women, aged between around 28-32, egg harvesting looked like an onerous but lucrative undertaking.

I’ve found myself thinking about my time in the US a bit lately, as I reflect on the polemics of the pandemic response in the US – the varying concepts of social contract, bodily integrity, sovereignty, history, slavery and the commercialisation of risk and flesh and blood. How to account for such vastly different approaches? Medicine and science gets you only so far. Anthropology, surely a little further. 

Sensationalism

Perhaps naively, I thought that most reporting on the ABC was without too much clickbait-y sensationalism, despite the shift to Dolly Mag headlines; ‘Marcella thought her toenails were completely normal, until one thing changed her mind!’

The pandemic, however, has proved that there is nothing more avaricious than the click hungry journo with a deadline.

Examples abound, but the most recent one I can think of was a headline that went something like, US schools opened in the middle of the Delta wave, but one thing worked!’. I note that the original headline has now changed, as so often happens, presumably after complaints about the misleading nature of the story.

The ‘one thing’ of course, is face masks. The article cites a US study that looked at many schools across many states, some with mask mandates and some without. In those schools with mask mandates, the rate of transmission was lower. A cursory reading of the study cited finds no mention of the one, most significant confounder – the rate of vaccine coverage in the surrounding area.

It is well known that high levels of community transmission correlate with high levels of school infections. Areas without masks are also more likely to have lower vaccine rates. The fact that this is not even mentioned in the article is pretty appalling, but achieves its purpose; an endless, toxic fight about masking in schools.

Likewise, endless articles about the ‘ballooning’ rates of transmission in England driven by high school kids. 14% of high schoolers in England are vaccinated.

The big pandemic story – rampant transmission and serious illness – is drawing to a close in Australia, but the media outlets aren’t giving up easily. In our local area, our adult vaccination rate is 97%, and teens are at 80%.

It’s having boringly predictable results.

The Otto cycle, running on fumes.

Grainy Model 3 Tesla.

Yesterday afternoon, as we drove home along the highway, a clapped out ute passed us, issuing plumes of black smoke as the driver floored it up the hill.

‘Wow, that’s really smokey’ observed keen-eyed-Karen, with her 12 year old smug disapproval. She had a point though – it was a shocker. As the smoke drifted into our car I smelled burning diesel oil. I explained to her that diesels blow blacker smoke than petrol cars, because it contains more carbon, and more soot. And that I suspected flogged rings rather than injectors, which would blow bluer smoke, and pour more unburnt fuel out through the exhaust. I explained to her that in the olden days, many people were finely honed sommeliers of clapped out diesel emissions, as we all tore around the countryside with elbows stuck out the window like a hopeful roll cage.

These days are fading fast. My daughter will learn to drive in an automatic, probably her grandfather’s car (we own three vehicles but I have a religious aversion to autos). And, a couple of years after that, she will start driving an electric car. Fiddling around with fuel systems will be a thing of the past. I’m already referring to petrol and diesel cars as heirloom technology.

And frankly, it surprises me that they took off at all. The Otto cycle is fundamentally ridiculous. During each revolution, the piston must come to a complete stop at both the top and bottom of the cylinder. The forces are immense. Even Wankel engines make more sense, and, again, we see technological determinacy in play. When all your engineering research is geared towards four stroke engines, it is easier to make iterative changes. Indeed, Nissan just released a new four stroke engine with variable head timing. That means the head can move to alter the compression ratio of the cylinders. This is all done mechanically. It is the absolute definition of over-engineering. There is clearly still an enormous amount of R&D invested in 4 stroke engines, primarily driven by the lack of infrastructure to support electric vehicles (I’m guessing).

Because let’s be clear, electric cars shit on petrol cars.

Take the biggest BMW engine on the market, the 4.3 litre V8 X6M. (Incidentally, the day that a car company reaches gender equality will be the same day that they start giving their new models actual names instead of numbers. Alpha, Delta and Mu seem popular). The BMW has got all the bells and whistles. Turbo charged injected cup holders. It does zero to 100 in 4.2 seconds.

The latest Tesla, Model 3, which will be a pretty standard car in a couple of years, does zero to 100 km/h in 2.5 seconds. That’s like sitting in an aircraft as the thrusters kick in. The biggest hurdle is putting all that power through the wheels and onto the road.

Pretty soon, Australians will connect their home solar to their car, and use the car as a battery. This isn’t far away.

The days of sniffing fumes are done.

Navigating the mind and the sea.

Today’s random 500 words is about Polynesian navigation.

I like it. What I particularly like is that the recent history of attempting to account for Polynesian wayfinding is a intersection of theoretical and empirical research. There is nothing like the observation of the sun rising and setting, at higher or lower latitudes, to deduce that the earth is indeed round, although I expect at some point in the near future, this concept to be completely dissolved into a fizzy cup of post-modern relativism. In other words, anyone can observe facts about their world and come up with a theory about what it might look like (round and slightly on the piss) without getting in a space ship for a squiz.

Incidentally this reminds me of an interview I heard with Bruno Latour recently, where he described his bemused surprise that his work on the interconnectedness of things had been used to interrupt the idea of scientific causality. Often theorists pen works that are deliberately abstruse, for their generative effect. That is, they cast out a canvas with some dots and lines on it, and let the reader decide what it means. 

Ultimately, the readers’ interpretation may not have any bearing on the original author’s intent, but may produce something of value nonetheless. And sometimes it just produces rarefied bollocks. Latour appeared tickled at the scale and hairyness of them. 

I digress. What is so intriguing to me about Polynesian navigation is that although the concept of a side reel star chart is relatively easy for the Western brain to apprehend, based, as it is, on the idea of celestial bodies moving from horizon to horizon, the rub is longitude. Westerners use time (speed) from a fixed point (Greenwich) to estimate how far around the globe they have travelled. And, of course, this method required an enormously complex and unfailingly accurate, seagoing clock (H3), with its famous bi-metallic strip. In short, it involved what might charitably be referred to as endless dicking around on boats.

Polynesians quite clearly had a method for estimating longitude that was extremely successful, many thousands of years before Europeans, or indeed, anyone else it seems (although this is contested). Indeed, there are two main theories. One of them is also a form of dead reckoning, measuring distance traveled (the same method that the pre H3 clock knickerbocker set used with varying levels of success) triangulating your position by comparing the prevailing ocean current and leeway against the wind and starting point. It sounds simple, but of course is extremely complex. The second theory is one that is perhaps lost, and is based on an even more complex knowledge of the stars. 

For me, what was most striking, when first reading about Polynesian settlement across the Pacific many years ago, is that New Zealand and Hawaii were the last to be settled. Obviously I knew about Aotearoa, but I had always been told that Hawaiiki was the ‘homeland’ and that the original founders had set off from there. 

But even with my limited experience, I could immediately see that this was unlikely and felt silly to have it pointed out. Polynesian waka sailed upwind to colonise the Pacific, and could easily and safely sail about 75 degrees off the wind, with the knowledge that the downwind run was a quick way to get home. Hawaiiki is well outside that 75degrees, (and so is New Zealand). Their boats had outriggers, and a rudder to steer them upwind further, but even so, travel to NZ and Hawaiiki was probably achieved last because of the colonisation of the Pacific – shorter distances to travel. It’s a long way from Micronesia to Hawaii. 

I suppose what came as something of a surprise to me is that I was so invested in what was essentially a fairy tale. No-one ever really said to me – Hawaiiki is Hawaii, but I think, just from the small amount of knowledge that I had, it seemed like it was. 

I suppose that was a lesson.

I love the history of the 20th century attempts to piece together an account of navigation techniques. It’s a testament to how hide bound we can be in terms of our models of how things work, our epistemology I suppose. It seemed almost inconceivable that one group of people could estimate longitude without (essentially) a chronometer. This was really only ‘discovered’ (rediscovered) in the 1970s, by direct experience – a bunch of salty sea dogs set out into the Pacific and navigated their way all over the show, without western instruments.

It’s very much worth thinking about how we come to know things and what stands in our way.

Well, I missed a day, in the ‘take your own advice and write something each day’ challenge that I freely dictate to others.

I hope no-one expects these little posts to make much in the way of sense or add anything meaningful to the dialogue. To wit; yoga and turbo chargers.

Any decent yogic guided meditation can also be readily repurposed as a smoko room pissing contest about turbo chargers;

Today’s guided meditation for bogans is about breath work.

Sometimes it feels like we can’t inhale enough air. Inhale. Draw it in, imagine the cool air coming deeply into your body. Go outside if you need to to find cooler air. Cool air is more dense, it has more volume. It is energising and powerful. It is powerful. You are powerful. Ignite your power. 

Sometimes our air is limited. We feel limited. Plant your feet widely upon the earth, and listen to the whistling of the wind and your compressor.  

Spooling up. And…..relax. 

Start at about eight to ten psi of boost and work your way up from there.

It’s important to remember to honour the process of slowing down too. Sometimes we stop too fast.  All that pent up pressure and energy drops away, it has nowhere to go. Watchful listening reveals the fluttering or chattering of birds’ wings, and the vanes of your turbo. Take the time to check-in with your blow-off valve. 

Spooling up…and relax

Ease into it. Take it gently. Don’t throw a code. 

And that’s today’s daily guided breath-work. Thank you for joining me. Have an amazing day everyone and remember, Mercury is in retrograde!

See what I mean?

As I was driving back from work this morning, where I experienced ridiculous, counter productive ‘covid safe’ measures I pondered the rigorous, uncompromising efficiency of the Carnot cycle. Everything is accounted for. There is no ‘waste’, only heat. Carnot efficiency has no time for counter productive measures.

We need to be vaccinated to enter our building. That’s a good measure. And, we must sign in. Also defensible. Good so far. And, we need to wear masks. There is no stipulation about what kind of mask though. So, many wear thin, loosely fitted cotton masks. I wear an N95 mask because if I am going to wear a mask, not wearing one that is effective seems like an insult.

Good so far. Now, we don’t have to wear masks in offices. OK fine, there are only a few people in each office, sometimes just one. But the air con system is connected to the rest of the building, in which there are many people. I turn the air con off in my office or lab and open the windows. The air outside is around 22c today,. I estimate that as a mammal I can tolerate a range of temperatures from around 15c to 30c indoors. At the moment, the outside temperature during the day rarely gets above 30c. Air con is unnecessary.

Here’s where it gets really stupid. All staff of my organisation are required to be vaccinated to enter the building. Periodically, there are people from another large organisation who use our building. They are not required to be vaccinated. Or wear masks, if today’s experience is anything to go by. So half of the people are following the ‘rules’ and the other half are not. And everyone, except me in my un air conditioned cave hewn from thousand year old basalt, is breathing the same air.

I’m starting to view almost all other ‘Covid Safe’ measures now for what they really are – sops for the unvaccinated. Why should I care, right? I’m reasonably healthy and can lay off the chainsaw juggling for a year or two while the health care system collapses? Because I also happened to see a middle aged woman today who is profoundly disabled, being helped along by her two care workers, both of whom I know are unvaccinated (because of gossip). These two might as well be weaving her remote control wheelchair in and out of the traffic on the four lane carriageway out the front of the building.

Maybe I’ll go to work next year.

Once again….

I haven’t written anything on this blog, or anywhere else, for months. I’m busy I suppose, but also side-lined, bright-lined and maligned by the endless task of interpreting statistics about disease and the lack thereof. Shifting paradigms.

Increasingly I’m drawn to two orthogonal poles. The first we might broadly refer to as ‘science’ – the shambling, iterative, dirty net curtain of rationality and causality. The second is more sociological or cultural – the idea that there are patterns, fashions, if you like, that characterise different intellectual epochs. These are slippery and developed in concert with their constituent technology. The best example of course, is the current one, our kind of technocratic rationalism, running on the fumes of utilitarianism with the inferred certainty of a kind of social Carnot cycle. In this model, we take scientific rationalism and apply it, writ large, to social problems.

As a fashion, we’ve been subject to this model for quite some time. Bureaucrats carefully but assuredly ‘pulling levers’, feebly adjusting the fuel mix of the economy in the vain hope that it will overcome its chaotic wobbliness. I suppose this is neoliberalism – the promise of certainty, stability in the face of an economic rationalism that perpetually threatens to end it all.

The model is anywhere and everywhere, the language of rational management, the bloodless accounting of society’s ups and downs. Consider the enormous and still flourishing network of ‘mental health’. An institution is sanctified and legitimised once it reaches a certain size and begins to upholster its processes with the baubles of ‘wellbeing’. One is ‘at risk’, then ‘assessed’ then, ‘assessed for risk of immediate harm’ then assessed for one’s ability to ‘engage with processes that might engender a meaningful shifts in outlook’ and then, and then and then. Of course, to those experiencing the pointy end of whatever institutional shafting the Random Shafting Generator has selected for them on any given day, this window-dressing is offensive. And that’s the point. It is, as they say, a feature, not a bug. It shifts blame to the victim, while assiduously ossifying the power of those who seek to create a seamless integration of professional and personal. The shiny-bummed carpet baggers.

Your personal is your political, and your political better get the fuck on board.

Examples abound. Just two days ago, the NSW state government declared a massive increase in funding for Headspace. This is a service that ‘deals with’ mental health issues amongst young people. Only, of course, it doesn’t. Being well acquainted with a former manager of Headspace, I can unsurprisingly inform you, Dear Reader, that Headspace does absolutely nothing for the mental health of those who seek its services. Because it provides nothing. That’s the point. It sits there telling young people who are distressed because they feel alienated from their lives, their families, their nature and their culture, that they have mental health problems. Young people who’re expected to find their way in the world, stumbling along on a diet of chicken salt and Fortnite.

Of course, for those who do, in fact, have mental health problems, like schizophrenia, no help exists at all. It was ever thus. The ex Headspace manager mused about the amount of money that could have been spent on young people with schizophrenia, were it not all being soaked up by the dangly-earring set, feeding teenagers a quaintly June Daly Watkins/Margaret Thatcher habitus.

I’ve digressed. Because this, ‘mental health’, was only meant to be an example of the broader style, or fashion, of thinking and talking, in which we are training ourselves. The technocratic rationality. At times is becomes visible for all – the anti vax debate is a particularly current example. On the one hand, the simple, modernist and muscular public health logic dictates the best outcome for the most people. On the other, a supreme adherence to individualism, fostered by what is now 30 years of neoliberalism, and cosseted by the rude good health guaranteed by previous public health measures based on the aggregated self, now illustrates the extent to which people grapple with the invisibility of government and their own (in)significance.

It feels clumsy to lump this way of thinking into BN (Before Neoliberalism) and after, but it is easy to delineate some key differences, through the prism of public health. We imagine the state is invisible, imagine our lives as governed by our own hard work and good fortune. Of course, this is sheer folly. The average Filipino works just as hard, if not harder, than the average Australian. Our Australian cards sit on the top of the economic deck because of our position in the ‘first world’, or ‘global north’. These benefits are almost entirely due to our government’s ability to consolidate influence within the global financial markets, either to create wealth from wealth, or to capitalise on wealth we ‘produce’ (commodities). At no point is there a direct linear relationship in which we can compare the output of an Indian, Filipino or Nepalese worker and an Australian in the same position.

I’m not going to get into a long-winded account of global currency markets, but it’s enough to say that our government’s role in our welfare and wellbeing is mostly ‘international’ rather than domestic. And yet it is the domestic politics with which we are the most familiar. This is how our governance is presented to us. Hot Mess Gladys and the endless handwringing over the intergenerational inequities in the housing market.

Public health is also invisible, unless there’s a crisis. Our wellbeing, the security of our nation in terms of ‘burden of disease’ is only relevant in broad terms.

I remember, many years ago, reading about risk and public health, from Nikolas Rose, who, ironically, is a biologist. What occurs (and this is because I can’t recall if it’s his idea, or perhaps my own that was generated through interaction with his work – suspect the former) is that risk helps us to imagine ourselves in the aggregate – it is a tool through which we might be controlled. Talking about our bodies through a prism of risk is something Foucault got hot and bothered about too. We can think of ourselves as entities disseminated through multiple strategies of risk. We’re all familiar with this way of talking and thinking about ourselves.

‘Smokers have a 50% chance of dying from a smoking related illness’

In this way, we might imagine ourselves as a collective, constantly shifting the levels on the risk amplifier we share with everyone else. Certainly, this was an element of neoliberalism – the utilitarian model applied to bodies as a means to control and moderate them, and to perfectly integrate them within a model of ‘productivity’.

And this is where fashion comes in. Because I am now old enough to recognise when this went out of favour, with the rise of identity politics. It happened with fatness. Partly, this was to do with over-reach. The model was overfitted. Risk was attributed everywhere, to everyone. The model got lazy. I remember the first debunking of the ‘Obesity Epidemic‘. Supposedly, obesity was causing high rates of diabetes and other poorly defined problems. The pendulum swung back, people began to question lazy data science. And, most importantly, there was a growing focus on the social consequences of ‘epidemics’. Who is affected and why? Who gets categorised, and what does that mean for them? What are the implications of being labelled fat?

We witnessed a shift in thinking, away from the rational, bio-deterministic models of social control, partly due to sloppy science, and partly due to the rise of the individual. Identity emerged; we began to hear terms like ‘fat shaming’ and the reclamation of physical attributes as identity (reclaiming the term ‘fat’ for instance). This is an interesting shift, a revocation and refusal of the bio medical model that sees humans as barely functioning meat-sacks on the fritz.

And then, we can trace the rise of the ‘victim’ narrative, salvation through identity. The rise of the virtuous disability, as yet another way to claim power.

Underneath it all, to me, these modes of thinking all retain one thing in common; they serve the same power that they always did.

That’s enough crapping on for one morning.

Addendum, By the way, I note that Nikolas Rose has shifted his interests to the ‘psy-disciplines’ and is, unsurprisingly, friendly with Foucault.