Love in the extremities

A friend has recently started a social media project about peri menopause, as my generation is the first to encounter every phase of life with a terrifying kaleidoscope of physical horrors of womanhood projected annually onto the Sydney Opera House at Vivid.

To be a woman is to be endlessly subjected to a narrative of biological frailty, a meandering pick-a-path of portentous foibles and malevolent corporeality. It begins when you’re about 9 – the whispering hints about periods and ‘developing’, then there’s the reality of dealing with menarche, and then, for the Gen Xers, the ongoing attempts to convince any and all medical professionals that whatever is wrong with you, from rashes to heart failure, probably won’t be solved by going on the Pill.

It’s not just the simple story of contraception, although that is enough of itself. It’s the rise in the preoccupation with this stuff, the deafening roar of body-fear. We are taught to fear every single aspect of our womanhood, to approach it with something between trepidation and naked dread. Limitless news articles warn of the nuanced chaos that our hormonally responsive bodies are plotting against us, a constantly evolving foe just waiting to bring us down.

Obviously some periods are worse than others – pregnancy is a particular nightmare. The culture of pregnancy, in case you didn’t know, provided an early model for all social media – the most dramatic stories are nourished, sensationalised and amplified. In my early motherhood days, surrounded by women who were pregnant or trying to be, I found myself surprised at the reaction to my ‘birth story’, precisely because it was completely ordinary. I’d say something along the lines of, ‘Yeah, it’s really painful, but let’s face it, we’re in a modern western society with free healthcare. If it all turns to shit, and there’s a good chance it will, it will still be OK. in my case, it turned to shit and it was OK’.

I truly believe much of the trauma associated with birth stems from the fact that women fear it, or that they have ideas about ‘the right birth’ and then feel ripped off when it doesn’t happen. These are all emotional responses. They have nothing at all to do with the actual physical reality of birth. If you can keep your shit together you will have a ‘good birth’, no matter what happens. If you lose your shit, it’s going to be awful. To be sure, there are women who end up with injuries from birth, and it’s reasonable to expect that this is difficult to adjust to. I’m not dismissing the fact that women can experience trauma but I think the way we go into this stuff makes us our own worst enemies. And we are encouraged to do so.

I’ve digressed. My point, I guess, is we live in a culture that is increasingly presented as a dualism – either we’re constantly scared of our bodies in a low level way or we’re ’embracing our bodies’ and completely ignoring the fact that they can kill us (the ‘always homebirth’ crew, I’m looking at you).

I don’t want to receive an upbeat blog-newsletter with meme-ified 90s pop references that forewarns me about the next reign of terror my body is plotting against me. For instance, apparently changing hormone levels in the next stage of life will alter my gut biome [problem] and change my metabolism [problem] and also my hair might fall out [problem] .

But I simply don’t give enough of a fuck because I’m now old enough to realise that this, like all of the ‘techniques of the body’ is nothing more than marketing and control, and, moreover, I’ve managed to work out all the other female-body shit that has happened so far without much incident. The first time you give birth your overwhelming observation is, ‘JFC none of that is ever going to come right’ but it does, and quickly. This is the thing about being a placental mammal.

And, without wanting to get too philosophical, I have a dear friend who is in her early 40s and is in the final throes of breast cancer. She will not experience these, ‘horrors’. Her hair has already long since disappeared. It feels so utterly wrong to be fuming about the minutiae of peri menopause or whatever it’s called this week when you’re chatting with someone who is actually dying, someone with children, someone who is so unbelievably loved. It’s just rude.

So, if you are a young woman, perhaps a woman who is thinking about having kids, or is having problems with your female arrangements, I would recommend only reading medical papers, if you’re really flummoxed, you could try WAITING IT OUT. Because the one thing that no one ever fucking says, with all the female-body-doom-scrolling is that things do change, and often, it’s for the better. You have a baby and your body heals. I read somewhere the other day that ‘birth trauma’ is defined as, ‘not fully healed after 3 months’. Who the fuck decided that 3 months was the cut-off date? This only makes sense if you think of this as part of a medico-marketing scheme to convince you that normal things should be pathologised. Another example – I can’t tell you the number of women I know who had terrible migraines throughout their childbearing years that remitted with menopause and yet I bet that if I googled, ‘menopause’ and ‘migraine’ I would get a litany of articles about how migraine is worse with menopause etc. etc.

Men do not get this shit, and partly it’s because their biology is different, obviously, but it’s not that different. Men’s hormone levels change over time. They enter different phases, their metabolism changes, they find themselves losing their hair, or at a higher risk of reproductive cancers. Where are the endless instagram accounts chirpily warning of their imminent demise?

So, my feminist anthem remains the same as it always has – fuck right off with that.

Demands

This is poorly thought through, but I just wanted to make some comment on the rise of the therapeutic narrative as a social movement, and its inevitable decline. We’re all of course now extremely well versed in the idea that one’s shortcomings should be pathologised and then adopted into one’s identity. Everyone has ADHD, or is neuro-divergent, or has ‘anxiety’ etc., etc., At least two generations of Australians have compartmentalised their personal banalities into regimes of ‘illness’ all of which intersect with very real social illnesses, like racism or sexism in particular ways, usually as a means by which they can inoculate themselves against criticism that they’re not dismantling them fast enough.

It’s easy to view the pathologisation of personality as a type of neoliberal strategy. It is victim-blaming people for dealing poorly with the exigencies of just-in-time capitalism. I saw this most clearly following our bushfires, where the Federal government sent psychologists instead of builders. Feeling depressed about losing your home? You have a mental illness. We will send psychologists to fix you, because you are the problem, not climate change or the lack of a house.

The pathologisation of personality also represents neoliberalism because it operationalises the idea of the body as a site of consumption. It is another medium through which you might explore and present new and fashionable versions of yourself, an act of branding that follows the herd while importantly, also makes some small contribution towards delineating the herd’s boundaries.

I think the cartography of this stuff is interesting though. Because on the one hand, self-diagnosing oneself with what young people refer to as, ‘mental health’ is one of the most distilled forms of privilege imaginable. Demanding that others make special space for you in the world is a form of power. Hospital cleaners at Westmead have limited ability to make demands based on their own quiver of mental foibles carefully fashioned through hours of sparkly TikTok videos.

As a representation of power that requires nothing more an a smartphone, is unsurprising that pathologised personality has become a game-ified form of social capital for younger people, typically those from wealthy backgrounds but without immediate access to capital themselves. This is no different to the ‘starving artists’ of years gone by, conspicuously celebrating their cultural capital in direct opposition to their economic capital. Bourdieu would be proud. I occasionally read the Artist Profile magazine – a beautiful experience in itself, profiling a selection of predominantly Anglo-Australian artists. It’s gradually becoming a little more diverse, of course, but to make it as a successful artist in this country requires patronage, and usually, this comes in the form of Mummy and Daddy.

This isn’t to say that the artists aren’t talented, or aren’t supporting themselves now, just that it took a lot of years of unpaid practice to ‘get good’, something generally unthinkable to those without a back-up plan of ‘the wee studio apartment at Mum and Dad’s in the Highlands’.

I think what’s interesting now is that people are cracking the shits with this exhausting regime of privilege. It’s clear that making endless, shifting demands to validated at all times and across all contexts is nothing more than land-banking privilege. This is fine when everyone has the surplus time, energy and wealth to indulge this kind of thing, but ultimately, the real victims of privilege, those who experience racism, sexism, classism – they still exist. And the recognition of what all this pathogisation of the self really is – power – is growing rapidly.

What’s it for?

Sometimes people wonder about the point of something like sociology or cultural studies, but seldom seem to criticise the purpose of anthropology. Anthropology, as most ‘westoids’ think of it, is the practice of studying funny, non western cultures. At its core is an exoticism that renders ‘the other’ as simplistic and inferior. One might suggest that this is an artefact of the process itself – when an outsider makes abstract pronouncements about how ‘a society works’, it’s bound to come up with some over-simplifications.

Others, however, genuinely think that western society and culture is uniquely sophisticated and nuanced, and broadly structured around the Enlightenment principles of rationalism and scientific thought. To an anthropologist, this is the funniest idea yet.

If social media has brought us anything, it has elucidated and amplified the rich silliness that characterises a complex society, and has always done so. Indeed, as our collective ideas about how the world operates become increasingly self-referential, we reach new and ever more vertiginous pinnacles of silliness. The madness of crowds grows ever madder the more we listen to the crowd.

In the past I’ve considered two topics – the Covid19 pandemic and what we might call ‘gender business’. My views on both topics are fairly ordinary – I’m broadly convinced by the emergent realities of both. What interests me much, much more, is the development of orthodoxies around both topics. How are mainstream views constructed? How are deviant views presented? What’s normal? What’s not? What’s legitimate? What’s not?

Unsurprisingly, the final arbiter of all of these questions is some old fashioned ideas about power. Access to an ‘old fashioned’ education enabled me to broadly predict the shape of the discourse of both social issues. For example, in order to get a grip on the emerging Covid19 pandemic, I read a lot of scientific papers. Some of them were errant bullshit. Or, perhaps I should say, some of them were more ‘speculative’ than others. I used my general sense of scepticism to assess the veracity of these papers, but importantly, I could express my cynicism using some pretty ordinary language/notation that I learned as part of a fairly ordinary education in statistics. This is a privileged position.

Likewise, the gender debate. For the past few years, most western countries have broadly (and not uncontroversially) adopted a model of gender that relegated biological differences between humans as no more than a locus of potential discrimination – like having a particular skin colour (as one famous feminist, MacKinnon, recently stated). It followed, therefore, that our bodies could be seen as a kind of stage for our gender, and we could alter them in line with gender norms.

There are some obvious logical inconsistencies here. For instance, the ‘gender norms’ that one might attempt to bring one’s body in line with are based in a biological understanding of sex. Why would a person want to remove their penis in order to live ‘as a woman’?. In other words, if our physical bodies are incidental to our gender, why alter them?

Body modification is consequential. Removing one’s penis or breasts, or undergoing hormone therapy are interventions with long term ramifications. My ordinary education enabled me to look for other examples of body modification. This is, of course, not the first time in human history that we have sought to modify our bodies to bring them in line with socially defined gender expectations. Female circumcision/FGM is a long standing example of gender-affirming surgery, which of course, brings us full circle to anthropology.

Many western countries sanction FGM. Indeed, in Nordic countries, girls from African backgrounds are subject to spot-inspections upon return from overseas travel, as a deterrent against parents obtaining FGM for their daughters whilst overseas. That a western government would provide genital surgery to one group of young women to bring them in line with gender expectations, but outlaw it for another, is a perfect example of cultural relativism. What characterises many of the current debates are inconsistencies. In a system that is supposedly based on rationalism and equality, inconsistencies render the system fragile.

There are other historic examples – this is from the DES Action Group, a group representing women who were treated with synthetic hormones in order to prevent them from growing ‘too tall’. What was deemed ‘too tall’? Anything over 175cm, or about 5 foot 9 inches*. The shocking part of this particular story is the cavalier attitude with which the hormones were used – it has since emerged that this treatment resulted in a multi generational risk for particular cancers. To be clear – for a treatment to confer a cancer risk in not one, but two generations of daughters, is extremely rare.

So, it’s clear that the social discourse surrounding care for people who want to bring their bodies more in line with what they see as normal gender expression has a pretty patchy history – usually, but not always, because it has involved women’s bodies. Again – very old forms of power are extant.

And now, as 2023 rolls on, the social narrative around appropriate care for young people who express some discomfort between their own bodies and what they think the norms of gender are, is changing. I’m not across all the details, but the medical and legal protocols are changing and accessing this treatment is becoming more difficult.

Three years ago when I first found out about young people, mostly girls, having body modification treatment of some form or another, I thought of both of these examples – FGM and the tall girls. Both treatments eventually came to be socially sanctioned, both on the grounds that those involved were minors. It was very difficult for me to see how the current ‘affirmation model’ – where social and medical transition sat alongside one another as an inevitable ‘correction’ would not follow the same eventual fate.

I’m not personally invested – nor was a personally invested in the debate over the correct action to take during the pandemic, but I am absolutely fascinated by the way the discourse of what is considered legitimate, reasonable, knowable and ethical is developed and shifted over time.

I really feel that if anthropology has any value at all, it lies in its ability to look at our own social milieu as just as silly as everyone else’s.

*What’s really fascinating about this is that the estimates for the girls’ eventual height were inaccurate and that the ‘treatment’ actually did not alter the girls’ final height much at all (although for younger participants, there was a stronger effect). Researchers, in a retrospective study, compared two groups of girls – those who had received treatment and those who had not. The estimated the final height for both groups of girls. The average difference between the estimated height and the real height at adulthood was 1.1cm for the untreated girls and 1.4 for the treated girls.

from here – https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18031324/

Hiatus

Such a hiatus!

I really underestimated how much work two jobs would be. Of course, as with all things, there are busy and quiet times, but when both jobs hit the busy period it gets quite busy indeed. Fortunately, both jobs were contract work, and have now ended, and so I now find myself employed more in line with my proclivities – that is to say – surfing.

I wrote a little while ago about ticks, specifically the the holocyclus species that we have locally. Ticks are the perfect example of a zoonotic clusterfuck – they perfectly illustrate the hubris of modern medical science. Ticks give people diseases in curious, non linear ways, with often ill defined pathologies and vastly different levels of severity. Oh, and some people, like myself, are naturally, genetically immune. The dullards amongst us might suggest that this is something that can be mapped onto my particular ethnicity or bloodgroup, but in the age of ‘identifying’ as various things that one is quite evidently not, I have concluded that the most logical explanation for immunity to alpha-gal allergy and disease is that I am three parts bandicoot.

Bandicoots live here, they are a stalwart of coastal NSW. Bandicoots are common and also, helpfully, really really cute. They have long prehensile noses that they use for spreading diseases around corners. The funny thing is – you never see them. They’re nocturnal, so that doesn’t help, but there are plenty of nocturnal Australian animals that you see all the time, everything from possums to those gamers with those pale, vestigial legs. Unlike the gamers, bandicoots spend a lot of their lives snuffling around in the leaf litter getting things done.

I’ve only seen them a couple of times, but I know there’s heaps of them. Bandicoots are absolutely essential to the life cycle of the paralysis tick. Without bandicoots there would be almost no ticks at all. Yes, ticks live on all sorts of animals, but bandicoots provide the nursery for the ticks. Without them, the numbers drop precipitously. Bandicoots are the only animal that is completely immune to the tick venom -they can literally carry thousands of ticks with no ill effect. And, as I said, they like to hang around in the leaf litter, which is an excellent place to acquire four million of your closest friends.

Paralysis tick – holocyclus

Ticks also like it wet – their eggs and larvae are prone to drying out. Indeed, the only truly effective treatment for tick control is diatomaceous earth – it essentially glues up with the eggs and, to a lesser extent, the larvae, and they dry out. When it’s wet there are more ticks. Usually, winter is a quiet time for ticks locally because our winters are pretty dry but the last two winters have been very wet, and the ticks have been on a rampage.

Currently, we haven’t had any decent rain for about a month – we appear to have returned to a more typical weather pattern, where the winter days are sunny and dry and reasonably warm. I would have expected the tick numbers to drop away to almost nothing however, that’s not the case. The ticks are going crazy this winter.

For the last six months or a couple of local government bodies have been shooting foxes. Foxes eat bandicoots. You can see where this is going. Indeed, there is such a boom in the bandicoot population that areas of suburbia look like they’ve been shelled by the world’s cutest and most poorly organised military (bandicoots leave little holes surrounded by a mound of dirt). Naturally, Australian suburbia has little time for Lawn Assaults, and so the level of consternation is high.

What’s really fascinating though is that there is so little research and information about ticks in south eastern Australia. We know how the mechanisms by which they fuck humans up, but we know surprisingly little about their life cycle and numbers – their ecology. Aside from the statement that bandicoots are important to the life cycle of the ticks, there’s almost nothing that gives any idea of how important. Now, as the bandicoot numbers explode, we’re getting a sense of the impact on tick numbers.

An example – I was talking to a landholder last week who did a cool burn years ago through a patch of Red Gum forest on his property. What returned, after the burn, was a monocrop of needle grass – basically, sharp pointy grass that foxes don’t like. So, the bandicoots were most impressed with the new digs and moved in in their thousands, and the tick numbers increased dramatically.

Coastal Red Gum

The importance bandicoots also helps answer some of the weirdest aspects of ticks – why are there so many in some places, but none nearby? I think it’s got something to do with how suitable the habitat is for bandicoots. Are there dogs around? Is the leaf littler thick enough? Bandicoots are also territorial, so there is an upward limit on how many one might find in an area, but that number is high.

I suppose what I’m most fascinated by is the lack of knowledge about the ecology of ticks. We live in an area where ticks regularly sicken humans and kill dogs (and other mammals) and we really don’t know that much about them.

Ticks, sterilising immunity, malaria, TB and bicycles.

Ah ha! Another blog post that breaks the hiatus, while I have spent several months encouraging a group of bemused adults to be a little more cynical about their world.

Let’s talk about debilitating pathogens!

Ticks are arachnids, which comes as a surprise to many people, although not to the svelte little ticks themselves, who are quite well aware of other spiders giving them the glad-eye. Ticks are absolutely bloody fascinating. They’re also endemic to my local area, and you’d be hard pressed not to know someone with the MMA – Mammalian Meat Allergy, as a result of a tick bite.

Our local species – holocyclus – which is Latin for ‘bastard that returns regularly on a bicycle’ has four main life stages; Eggs, larval, nymph and then fully grown, known locally as the shellback tick. Ticks can’t actually move in the first three stages – they are fully reliant on an animal, warm or cold blooded, to sit or lie down on them in order to get a feed. They are truly the Channel 10 gameshow of pests. Only with a feed of blood can they progress through to the next round. This is important, because many people think that ticks can move around on their own, but most of the time they can’t.

Ticks are heavily reliant on animals, in most cases, mammals like kangaroos and bandicoots, to get around. This is why people with dogs seem to have far less ticks – the dogs inhibit the movement of the native animals – basically, they keep them away from humans. Of course, sometimes the ticks bite the dog, but this isn’t one of those gently whimsical New Yorker cartoons. If you have a dog, it should be on Bravecto.

Reactions are broadly divided into two – a local, allergic reaction to the tick, potentially fatal, and a resulting mammalian meat allergy, also potentially fatal. Adult, or shellback ticks, are the only ticks that can provoke these reactions. The smaller nymph or ‘seed ticks’ can cause a local reaction, but not a dangerous one.

The mammalian meat allergy was only discovered around 20 years ago, in Sydney. It is a reaction to an epitope, Galα1-3Galβ1-4GlcNAc-R, and it is an allergy to red meat and pork, and WIFI passwords. Alpha gal (for short) is excreted by the adult shellback tick.

Humans and Old World monkeys are the only animals who do not produce alpha gal. We lost the ability to produce it, somewhere in our evolution (more of this shortly). As a consequence, humans developed the ability to produce high levels of antibodies against alpha gal. This is what causes the reaction. So, why would it be that humans and Old World monkeys are the only animals to have ‘dropped’ alpha gal?

Alpha gal resembles the coating or surface of the malaria and tuberculosis viruses. This suggests that at some point, there was a genetic bottleneck, whereby the burden of these diseases was so great that it acted as a selection event. Those who generated high antibodies against malaria or TB survived. They were the fittest. It is thought that this is why humans lost the ability to make alpha gal – because those who didn’t make it themselves saw it as foreign when it was encountered, and produced antibodies against it.

MMA is also present in other countries with ticks, although different species to those found in Australia. In Sweden, researchers examined data relating to anaphylactic responses to tick bites and found that almost everyone was susceptible, except those with blood type B (around 16% of the population in Australia, but varies depending on your population). So what is it that makes people with B blood fairly ‘immune’ to fatal tick reactions and/or resulting meat allergies?

Alpha gal looks like malaria and TB, yes, but it also looks like an antigen that people with B type blood make themselves. So, when the B team encounter alpha gal, they don’t have a reaction.

It probably does, however, make them more susceptible to malaria and TB. But at least they can eat bacon while they die.

Indeed, the relationship between alpha gal and malaria is prompting vaccine research. This paper, and there are many like it, looked at ‘natural immunity’ against malaria, amongst exposed people in Mali and Senegal. It found the people with high levels of alpha gal antibodies had high immunity to malaria. This is a Big Deal.

The same effect is observed in TB;

“Likewise, tuberculosis patients in the Iberian Peninsula (Portugal and Spain) had low anti-α-Gal antibody levels when compared to healthy individuals. These groundbreaking findings suggested that anti-α-Gal antibodies might protect not only against Plasmodium parasites but also against other pathogens expressing α-Gal on their surface….The current paradigm is that immunity against M. tuberculosis relies exclusively on cellular defense mechanisms. However, mounting evidence supports that humoral immunity contributes to protection against tuberculosis.” 2017

Interestingly, it’s long been known that people with O type blood were more susceptible to getting sick with malaria, and initially, some thought that these two things were related. But, they are not. O type blood promotes rosetting, which is basically a way that the virus drives blood cells to increase infection. It is a completely different mechanism to the alpha gal antibodies, which prevent infection in the first place.

Those of us with B type blood are more susceptible to malaria and TB, and indeed other viruses that ‘look’ like alpha gal. But, we’re less likely to drop dead from a fatal tick reaction.

As I said before, it’s only the adult tick that can give you a reaction. There are two ways this can happen. The first is scientifically known as ‘scratching at it like a m-fucker and pulling it out with tweezers in the dark without your glasses on’. This squeezes the tick’s body, giving you an injection of The Stuff. Anecdata suggests that a potentially fatal reaction is much more likely when it’s in your head, which is a feeling familiar to any woman who has visited a doctor at any point in her life.

The second option is that the tick itself will inject The Stuff, after 4 days of feeding. This is unlikely to happen to anyone older than a baby, as most people know when they’ve got a tick attached to them and rip it out.

The best option is to freeze them. There are now products on the market that provide a short squirt of ether that freeze-dries Ms Tick (only adult ticks AFAE (Assigned Female at Egg), feed on humans.

And, because this is Australia, you can also use this stuff;

They’ll both kill ticks but only one of them will eventually leave you in need of a re-bore.

And that’s today’s post about genetics, evolution, deadly pathogens and bicycles.

Sheep, goats, angry men in coats.

One of the most troubling elements of recent political life is that some of my fondest theories and literatures are being recast in a new light, and it’s not flattering. The Frankfurt School, comprised of a twitchy bunch of middle-European men, thick in both coat and brow, produced much of the most prescient works on the cultural aspects of consumerist culture.

Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse angrily penned blistering critiques of low culture – films, books, T.V and drew direct lines between consuming this shit and quietly by-standing the Holocaust. More than fifty years on, all of their works are still troublingly apposite, but perhaps what’s become most alarming to me is that their ideas and language have been co-opted by what we might charitably call, ‘the far right’.

Consider this quote from Herbert Marcuse (1964),

Independence of thought, autonomy, and the right to political opposition are being deprived of their basic critical function in a society which seems increasingly capable of satisfying the needs of the Individuals through the way in which it is organised.

Every day some version of this statement will turn up on my Instagram account, usually in the service of those who champion, ‘freedom’. The anti-vax movement didn’t initiate this movement but it networked, refined and mobilised those with nascent views about their ‘freedom’. You know the people I’m talking about – the sovereign citizens, terrain theorists, bio hackers, survivalists etc.,. People I don’t normally think of myself as naturally gravitating towards. Although these people are generally characterised as being racist (something I can’t judge really as I have the privilege of not paying enough attention) what I am absolutely sure they are united by is a sneaky whiff of anti-semitism. The Frankfurt School would be sizzling.

The irony of bleating about the insidious and nefarious social and political manipulation rolled out through instagram is not lost on me. And yet claims about how the mainstream media depoliticises and poisons us, frames junk choices, broadly, controls us, continue apace. Here’s Adorno (1974), not even remotely writing about Instagram,

The phrase, the world wants to be deceived, has become truer than had ever been intended.

The resonance with today’s current bunch of wellness warriors is acute.

So what to make of this? For me, it’s like discovering that your high minded, moral, well-meaning religion (critical theory) has been adopted by Hillsong. Extremism is the hallmark of ‘not really understanding what the Frankfurt School was on about’. The creation of binary narratives – sheep/goats, blind/seeing, redpilled/bluepilled etc.,. are simplistic meta-narratives that mirror the ones that ‘freedom warriors’ claim to be so keen to resist.

The people who really get on the wagon with the ‘freedom’ talk are doing exactly the same thing as the people who run their lives according to the mainstream consumerism presented to them via the same channels. The sheep and the goats are equally serviceable in a curry. They are all making and producing and reproducing themselves and their identities through the medium of images presented and controlled through social media.

Herbert Marcuse claimed that ultimately, the main aim of the culture industries was to make profit, and I think that’s the right place to start thinking about this. Because although people who are extreme about what we might loosely call ‘the freedom movement’ mediated through social media, it is the social media platforms that make money out of them. They are, to repeat the phrase, the product.

Often, these social media personalities complain about being silenced or moderated or edited by the platform because of their unpopular views (for instance, people having their anti-vax posts removed) but in fact, the posts that get removed are the ones that don’t make the platform enough money. Engagement plus advertisement makes profit.

Perhaps these ‘influencers’, bravely baring their unshaved clackers to the world to give a defiant finger to ‘transhumanism’ are aware that the platform still makes money out of their content, but think it’s an acceptable price to pay for the ability to get the message out.

A vast majority of the content about ‘freedom’ exists in the health sphere, and was consolidated and weaponised by the anti-vax issue. Suddenly, a big part of the ‘wellness’ sphere transmogrified into a tight coalition of ‘paleo-bros’ and ‘bio hackers’ – a very male dominated eco system of tightly wound, mostly white guys who are succesful in part because you can’t smell ketosis through the screen. These people, like many, many others (including me) are convinced that the modern food industries are designed for profit rather than human health. It’s very hard to argue with that. But their criticisms of the corporate structures that engender the ‘food’ economy are refracted through their own bodies, identities and relationships. They use much of the language of the men’s rights movement – that men should be strong, protective, muscle bound, virile etc.,. and that the modern food industry has feminised men and contributed to the breakdown of the modern family.

In other words, the ‘anti authoritarians’ question and reject the meta narratives of science, government, risk and control and replace them with another set of equally controlling hyper individualistic notions of personal sovereignty, that amount to little more than outing themselves as advanced hyper-consumers who are seeking to reproduce much older traditional ideas about the family and masculinity. The main difference between the meta narratives of science, governmentality and risk is the focus on humans as a group whereas the ‘anti-authoritarians’ are extreme individualists. These people are the ultimate consumers – they are performatively made and remade through their relationship to the products they consume.

To be clear – BOTH groups are pretty bad. On the one hand, there’s the mainstream, slavish adherence to ideas about how to be a controlled body – eat mass produced food and consume the ‘mental health’ bullshit that renders you governable. Many of the strategies of government and public health exist to address the obscene rates of illness that are a direct result of corporate negligence in the service of profit.

BUT, the extreme ‘anti-authoritarians’ are doing more or less the same thing – finding their tribe, allowing themselves to be completely preoccupied with their narcissistic individuality, completely obviating the possibility of political engagement in the current omnishambles. They are noisily ‘opting out’ and thinking this will solve everything.

What to make of all this? How to retain my love affair with critical theory as liberation? For me, it’s with the help of two ideas – governmentality and anti semitism.

The idea of an extreme freedom midwived through extreme narcissism and cultivation of the performative individual is little more than the most modern iteration of identity-based, late capitalist consumerism. The appeal of simplistic, formulaic ideas of control (government bad and evil versus plucky heroic freedom warriors) simply reproduces some very well worn patriarchal tropes. It’s Star Wars in yoga pants.

And anti-semitism? Well, the idea that the extreme left and right are connected by anti-semitism isn’t new. The left think that major media corporations are Jewish controlled, and as such, governments dance to their tune. The right are anti-semitic for more tribal reasons. Both frame Judaism as a powerful, controlling force with a ready supply of sleeper foot-soldiers. The Frankfurt School was developed precisely because its founding members were understandably horrified by the way in which the Holocaust could be countenanced by regular, ordinary working people – their friends, neighbours, colleagues and associates. I’m always stunned when I see people at protests holding signs that say, ‘Always wondered who let the Jews be taken away? Now you know’ etc.,. These are always the same people who ascribe to ideas about the global order that aren’t much different to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

And with that, it’s time for me to go and make a potentiated almond goat’s uterus smoothie.

Reality, but make it fashun

I’ve only got five minutes to write today but last night my kid was harassing me about climate change, and some of the pretty scary science that describes it. And it is scary, to be sure, but there’s also the issue of doomerism, uncertainty and the very real fact that we’re aware of the impact of burning fossil fuels and gradually, in a half-arsed, we’re cocking it up, shambling, bitching pissing and moaning kind of way, doing something about it.

It will always be too little, and will it always be too late to return us to what went before, but that’s extremism talking. And extremism, where we must have the absolute answer, the absolute solution, the absolute position to the exclusion of all others, is very much the vibe of the moment. And it’s a product of manipulation. It is how we are being taught to think about problems.

I’m increasingly seeing the media’s portrayal of all issues as either reality-driven or anti reality. We’ve been coddled into this. Ten years of inspirational Instagram tiles telling us to, ‘make our own truth’ and ‘be who we want to be’, to ‘manifest our destiny’. People who think this New Age fuckspeak is without consequences are foolish in the extreme. And it’s not a modern phenomenon either. In the 80s I remember all those books and movies about how the winsome protagonist made his dreams happen because he believed in himself. It’s the lynchpin of shifting the focus from the macro (large organisations, corporates, governments) to the micro (individuals). And now we’ve cultivated the individual so much so that we think we can bend reality. I distinctly remember going to a friend’s place to watch Live Aid, on the tele, interspersed with footage all those poor wee kids with their swollen tummies who had failed to believe in themselves.

A friend’s social media post yesterday alerted me to the newest Covid fad – the Event 401. ‘Look it up! It’s all right there, people just can’t be bothered to even look, they’re such sheep!’

Event 401 was a tabletop exercise run by Johns Hopkins in 2019, aimed at hypothetically testing global preparedness for a SARS-like pandemic.

If you recall, SARS (and MERS) were a bit of a bugger. The global response was broadly effective, albeit in the usual shambling kind of way. And then, when it all died down, everyone got together and went,

‘Phew, that was ugly, thank goodness it will never, ever happen again!’

Oh, hang on. No, that’s not quite right.

In actual fact, they got together and said, ‘Given what we know about the conditions under which SARS and MERS emerged, we should expect another zoonotic to human pandemic within the next 20 years. Let’s prepare for it (including the development of potential vaccines)’.

If Event 401 is supposed to prove that Covid19 is a hoax then I can’t wait to see these idiots discover earthquakes.

But this is where we’re at. We are at the point where completely predictable, observable reality is positioned as proof of a hoax.

“See that? It’s rain! it’s raining!”

“Yes, it is”

“Toldya. Sheep”

I’m now watching my friends argue on instagram about the participation of permaculture activists in the Melbourne protests.

‘You’re protesting with Nazis! And you’re being manipulated by Clive Palmer!’

It perfectly encapsulates the two characteristics of modern thinking about these problems; You have a tribe, and the price of allegiance is to forsake all others. If you’re anti vaccine mandate, therefore you march with Nazis. Therefore, you are a Nazi. Or, if you believe in permaculture, you don’t believe in science. All these positions, from Nazism to permaculture to anti vax assume one thing – a puritanistic supremacy of the individual to force their truth on to reality.

It’s much more nuanced than that. I can understand the position of the permaculture people on vaccines – to see humans as sitting within a web of life, rather than outside of it, and to focus on the web rather than the individual. We are ‘cheating’ nature with vaccines. Nature would have us die. Indeed, nature would have killed somewhere between 15 to 40% of the people at the protests, before they had reached 60. That’s reality.

I’ve personally been saved by modern medicine no less than 8 times in my life, maybe more. And that’s just the direct impact of medicine. And that’s before plumbing.

It’s no good being a puritan about this shit unless you’re willing to accept the endpoint – natural death. But puritan individuality is what we are constantly trained to think about. Because projecting our sense of individual power over our circumstances plays into the biggest fleecing of all – that climate change requires individual rather than systemic change. This cult of the individual is nothing more than fashionable politics. It is adorning oneself with something that makes you feel good, endlessly reinventing yourself in an empowering but ultimately innocuous and futile way. The irony is that it’s often the permaculture/wholeness/wellness people who’re most involved in their own personal identity brands.

We are personalising the political. And it will be the buggering of us.

Season Three; Covid in the Antipodes.

It’s fascinating watching New Zealand’s Covid journey from New South Wales. There’s the sense of watching a TV series for the second time. Oh, here’s the initial panic episode and the strong and comforting central government. Oh, and the one with the lockdown, I loved that one, people are putting teddies in their windows! 

Then there’s the self-congratulatory faux humbleness, (surely New Zealand’s strongest suit), the confident commitment to technocratic, sensible management of crises, the endless positive affirmations of kindness and community mindedness. And then there’s the subsequent inevitable unraveling of aforementioned narrative, as pre-existing cracks in the technocracy are rendered not only visible but festering. 

New Zealand is up to the part where Covid illuminates every social faultline; The racism, the hungry kids in garages, the self-aggrandising carpet-baggers, the tragic Facebook warriors and through it all, the monolithic government like a doughty, bristle-lipped governess reminding everyone to be kind and ‘do the right thing’ while nimbly avoiding the service class downstairs. 

It turns out the Team of Five Million is actually more of a round-robin arrangement, and no-one’s washing the jerseys. 

And here’s where our Antipodean Covid TV series differs. New Zealand’s government assumes the best in people and governs in line with its expectations. New South Wales, which, you might recall, stuttered into life as a penal colony, expects the very worst of its citizens and plans accordingly.

Covid in New South Wales was a very Sydney affair. It hit the eastern suburbs and gathered pace, all lip-gloss and lattes, a beautiful, slick and sweaty shambles. Eventually, it crossed the Opal Line into the sprawling Western suburbs and got seriously on the razzle. 

There was a lockdown, for sure, but the Berejiklian government, and NSW Health both seemed to understand one thing; tipping points. That is, once a city reaches a certain size, movement around it will reach a critical mass, a tipping point, even under a lockdown.  

And this is where I think the NSW government got serious and decided to try to ‘vaccinate out’ of the outbreak. From the start, even before the rancorous anti-vaxxers really got cracking, NSW made it clear that if you were offered a vaccine you should bloody well take it, and that this was the key to ‘freedom’. 

Berejiklian’s management of the pandemic was widely supported. She was decisive and did something stunningly obvious but remarkably clever; she presented the virus as immutable. It would move from one person to another regardless of their family arrangements or how essential their work was. The virus doesn’t care about us, we are its environment.

It might seem obvious but compare this to alternatives. 

At the beginning of the first long outbreak in Victoria, workers in Melbourne’s boiler-plate suburbs were diagnosed and ordered to stay home, while other household members continued to attend school and work. This was viewed as reasonable, fair and kind. The reasoning was based on the idea that kids shouldn’t miss out on school, or employees on work. The virus, however, does not care for your feelings or ‘rights’. And so, constraining the movement of some but not others had a punitive feel about it, ‘You caught the virus, but your housemates shouldn’t be punished for it [sotto vocce: but you should]’. It served to further personalise the virus.

And the results of this approach were predictable – further spread of the virus, prolonged restrictions. 

Berejiklian knew her people. She knew that most people would get vaccinated, but worried that the final proportion would be too low to ‘end’ the outbreak in NSW. She also knew that the good burghurs (ratbags, all of us) of Sydney would be unmoved by Strawberry Shortcake moralising. And, most importantly, the Berejiklian government wanted to avoid a situation where citizens attempted to pressure one another socially over vaccination. This is an extremely poisonous situation, still evident in many places even now, where people align themselves into pre-existing ‘camps’ and politicise the shit out of vaccination. This is a very, very dangerous game to play.

The NSW government knew perfectly well that most people would get vaccinated with a bit of a push, and that this was preferable to the damage of a prolonged outbreak combined with the social disruption of pitting one ‘group’ against another. 

A consummate politician, I have no doubt that Berejiklian herself was also well aware of the Australian media’s thirst for whipping up polarising and dangerous debates.    

The government assumed, quite rightly, that people would lose interest in the pandemic once life started to resemble something close to normal. A leader who could make that happen had a lot to gain.

New South Wales had the benefit of watching the pandemic churn its way through similar jurisdictions with lower vaccination rates, and the social consequences of its inevitable politicisation. The wittering pomposity of the middle classes set against the white-hot rage of the disenfranchised, refracted through a prism of ethnic sectarianism that would make the Balkans look frankly vanilla is exactly not what a New South Wales Premier would like for Christmas.

Berejiklian knew that faced with similar circumstances to those overseas, the good people of New South Wales would likely dither over vaccination and ongoing restrictions would fan the embers of pre-exisitng discontents into an inferno. By about mid August, New South Wales had the makings of a nuclear shit-show. 

And so the NSW government went hard on its campaign; Get Vaxxed or Get Fucked. 

And it worked. 

The reason it worked is because it removed the immediate problem – Covid overwhelming the hospital system and people dying as a result. It provided ample opportunity for pissing and moaning about the ‘manufacture of consent’ but the threat was defanged. Suddenly, it seemed, most people couldn’t give much of a toss about Covid, or the vaccine. And many of the ‘social dilemmas’ that were acute at 60% vaccination rate are quite benign at 95%. You might balk at inviting the unvaccinated cousin to Christmas dinner, but no-one’s really going to take it outside. It turned a potentially devastating debate about the social contract into a parlour game for the Twitterati.

To be clear, the New South Wales government forced many people into getting vaccinated, on the basis that it was for the greater good, even if it was unlikely to benefit them personally.

Berejiklian’s Get Vaxxed or Get Fucked campaign was precisely to avoid fostering acrimonious debates about whose individual rights should prevail over the collective, a debate that always taps into the deepest, extant notions of just who has been wronged, like a tongue on an open nerve. No government ever wants to provide the conditions for these kinds of excavations. It bears repeating, there is nothing more corrosive than a deep and searching public discussion over whose individual rights should prevail over the collective. It ferments a kind of toxic grievance-based partisanship that can never, ever end well.

Berejiklian knew that the path to social harmony was not paved with goodwill and community spiritedness (are you listening, NZ?). Rather, it is a gravel road, shellacked with a quick and dirty layer of prosperity and self interest.

I can’t wait to see what Season Four, Covid in Aotearoa brings.  

*to be clear, I am not referring to Ms Ardern as a bristle-lipped governess. I use this term to refer to the government of the day, as is clear in the sentence. It infuriates me no end that Ms Ardern has personal attacks made against her, especially given that she is arguably the best Prime Minister New Zealand has had in recent times.

Calculated Risk

Those who’re anti vaccine mandate, or anti public health lockdown provide the best support for broad scale public health measures; they’re privileged enough to be alive to prosecute their case, in spite of their ability to interpret the dangers of a dead possum in the water tank.

We’re now in the second year of endless arguments about the ‘public’ in ‘public health’, defining once and again, both the ‘precise tragedy’ and the exact dimensions of ‘the commons’. Fighting, time and again, about who has the right to swing their fist and who should move their nose.

Those who’re anti lockdown, or anti vaccine are arguing that there is no such thing as the collective, no sum that is greater than its parts. Many historians have argued that the first governments emerged as a direct response to disease – the need to organise people in accordance with a rationale that was not immediately understood by those on the ground. It required a new thing called ‘trust’.

And it’s in short supply, blah blah, we’ve heard it all before.

But the real question for the ‘freedom warriors’ is what is the endgame? What if SarsCov2 was as fatal as MERS, or smallpox? What if it only killed children? How many ‘warriors’ would support vaccine mandates and lockdowns? None? All? How many would go to their righteous graves? How many would be chastened?

This is the real question. If your answer is ‘never’ then you’ve given up on the collective altogether. For you, personal sovereignty looks like those adults in those religious sects in the US who watch their children die from the most excruciating conditions, because the government, other people, can’t intervene.

And let’s be clear, the next MERS is probably within my lifetime. We will face this question again.

Where does ‘the public’ in public health kick in?

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.