Out of Warning Signs

At some point, the Victorian Board of Education set as a text a play set in Newcastle about a blue collar worker who had a friend in management, a deadbeat girlfriend and a sister with special needs and the play followed his life basically falling apart.

We had to read the play script, and I think my school even had the budget to bus us to Melbourne to see a theatre company put on a couple of key scenes from the play.

I can't remember the name of the play, I could probably find an archive of set texts for the years I did highschool but it's not important for setting the scene here.

The play was about the deindustrialization of the late 80s that happened in a lot of places. The climax of the play involved the worker grandstanding as he realised he was going to become structurally unemployed, have to put his sister in a home and his girlfriend would leave him and his best friend betrayed him, so he douses himself in petrol and makes this big speech before revealing it was just water and getting arrested or something.

At some point in his speech he says "if the writing was on the wall how come it wasn't read aloud?" and that probably makes an impression on me, because it was this complaint of a type that the obvious was not obvious enough.

I hope, the playwright wasn't meaning it literally in terms of a steelworker being illiterate and so newspapers and P&L statements etc should be read out to people.

Now, where I'm at in terms of navigating "the world" as we call it, is this space where I'm bracing for just a wall of stupid to come crashing down. It's really hard to define, but I think we've been networking stupid up and some of it is obvious - like the flat earth conspiracy community - where not so much new forms but new levels of stupid have been made possible by not just the internet, but social media, algorithms etc.

It's the less obvious stuff. Like, go back to 2004, smartphones aren't quite a thing yet, and if they are only executives use them to email. People are commuting to work driving their Hyundai, with a bowl of cereal between their legs, texting their mum using a numeric keypad on their Nokia to confirm plans for Easter, applying lipstick and listening to talkback radio. This is stupid, and a daily routine. What makes it nefariously stupid though, is that it's reasonably safe. This person stop-starting through peak hour traffic may have increased their chance of having a traffic accident a thousandfold.

But what that looks like, is that when they are driving with their hands at 10 and 2 on the wheel, watching the traffic and doing headchecks and mirror checks, they may only have a 1 in 100,000 chance of having an accident. With their phone, the cereal, the makeup the whole morning routine, their chances of having an accident jump up to 1 in 1,000.

That means this individual can be expected to maintain their morning commute without incident for three whole years. In the meantime, to compound their stupidity, each time they drive dangerously and don't have an accident, they build their confidence that their driving practices are safe. This is likely how someone winds up driving through rush hour with a bowl of cereal between their knees, applying makeup while texting their mum.

Now, we live in a world where reports are being written by nobody, read by nobody, executive summaries are being summarized, people are subbing in statistically generated grammar for thought, simply because they can't tell the difference.

People are potentially already making hiring decisions, where they are like "well I could hire a receptionist, but what if my receptionist could also give me legal, medical and fashion advice..."

And it seems likely to me, that the potential cumulative stupidity we are building up, is likely far far larger than I can imagine.

Now I've steered this in the direction of generative "AI" or LLMs but I suspect my real concern, and the real subject of this post, about writing on a wall and it not being read aloud, has been with us longer in the form of siloing via algorithms. Internet echochambers. 

Its the conundrum of even being able to warn anybody anymore of anything.

So Hard to Describe

I don't think it's a "chicken little the sky is falling" thing, or a "boy who cried wolf" thing even, this is more something sci-fi short story writer Harlen Ellison put his finger on:

You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. No one is entitled to be ignorant.

That's from 1993 according to wikiquote. I'm talking about something that has evolved into something more. 

It's sharing a planet with a population for which if you put up a warning sign, the response may be "I didn't think I had to take it seriously, nobody warned me that I should pay attention to a warning sign."

So you put up a warning sign that says "warning: things warned of in warning signs may be real and actual." and then someone with bleeding stumps says "well nobody warned me that the warning about heeding warning signs was something I needed to pay attention to. I thought I could choose to ignore it."

The world we live in seems to have become a little more "Land of do as you please" and a little more "Global Cassandra" where Cassandra is the priestess of Apollo who was cursed by Him with the gift of prophecy but nobody would believe her. As such in Greek classics like the Iliad and Odyssey and plays, she gets all these scenes like "That Horse is full of Greeks that will destroy Troy if you bring them inside the gates" and "Agamemnon your wife Clytemnestra is having an affair and they are going to kill you in the bath and then kill me." and so forth.

A few weeks ago, I was watching a guy present to a group of old people about basically how the "Awokening" has collapsed, that loose cluster of memes and rhetoric that hung about for a decade, accomplished some things, but not what they were intended to. I felt in my waters that the fever broke pretty much in 2024 after Kamala lost the election and it seems to be an insurmountable reckoning that rather than being wrong, the memes were just insurmountably unpopular and grossly unequal. This guy was pretty much doing a post-mortem, very clinically and citing data to serve as proxies for the nebulous thing.

And Bitcoin's value in USD I believe crashed far enough that somebody with their money in an index fund for the past five years will finally have outperformed the bitcoin bubble. It has almost halved in USD since October of last year.

But then there's the Space X IPO, and I still have to hear about "AI" all the time in my contact with educational institutions. In terms of being a Cassandra, it was this depressing moment when I perhaps became truly old, understanding that there is always going to be something.

Like I already was persuaded to accept tentatively the position of moral-progress skepticism, but I was thinking in terms of living memory. Now I'm thinking, moral-progress has a half-life of less than a lifetime. 

And it's not young people, like I don't think the young can really put the thumb on the scale, and people are remaining infantalised longer and longer. It's this strange thing of like, like today the media got details of the agreement signed between Trump admin. and Iran to open up the straight of Hormuz for 60 or 90 days or whatever. And fucking journalists this was their moment to finally suggest that maybe the US had gone and done a debacle. 

I've heard people comment on access-media, both for Disney and the White House, but I think there's something bigger than that at play too. It's like journalism at some point, began to see themselves as diplomats. Or rather, constrained as diplomats, but not just in what they could say, but what they could think.

Like journalists by and large, had to pretend that a President had some kind of strategic interest in the decisions they make. I don't think I want to live in this world where presentable people in good suits sit at desks in big fancy studios on the BBC and ABC and situation room and wherever else who all seem decent and respectable and constantly confused by the news they are reporting.

I think I would prefer to live in a world where a sleazeball ashes their cigarette into a crystal ash tray with dark rings under their eyes and sweaty patches under their arms and they are astonished by nothing that they read because they are a real journalist whose investigations and experience of the world have turned them cynical.

I fucking hate the "Leopards ate my face" meme, it is so improv, alas, it's true, but what I'm saying is that we seem to be living in some kind of world where we have to assume that the people who vote for the face eating leopards party, are the people who will say "I had no idea leopards were dangerous animals that eat people's faces" and then we say "but we told you they were dangerous animals that will eat people's faces, and not only that but they told you they were dangerous animals that eat people's faces and if elected will eat your face AND WE TOLD YOU THEY TOLD YOU THAT." and they say "oh...I just thought you were brainwashed or had some agenda."

That's the scary nature of our times. Some fucking mind bending bullshit where to say "you were told" earns you a "yeah but you didn't tell me you were telling me." or more simply "oh but I was also told something else" and if you are like "so how did you choose?" they are like "I chose what felt good in the moment."

Ghostbusters 2 finally available on VHS as New Rental in Blockbuster Australia!

The title of this post describes roughly what it feels like to see unavoidable news coverage of Australia's far-right fringe political party "One Nation" experiencing a surge in the polls.

In this regard, Australia is not so much "fashionably late" to the global right-wing populist phenomena as humiliatingly late. I'm aware we can turn and point to Reform UK as a virtually identical political development buuuuuuuuuuuuuut still, I mean it's also quite embarrassing given what people already think of Australia to have to sit here when people ask us "Is their an Australian Trump/Farage analogue?" and we've gotta be like "It's my mum she works in a fish and chip shop."

I Lose, You Lose, We All Lose for Losers

This is a global phenomena, and Australia is particularly analogous to the UK - the traditional "right wing" or Neo-Liberal Conservative party got obliterated in the last national elections largely because interest rates were high.

The only real difference, was that in Australia the Labour party, a left-wing neoliberal party were incumbent. All the polling showed that the traditional conservative party of Australia were set to take government, Albanese had no real answer, all he could do was delay, and delay, and delay calling an election until...Trump had his liberation day and announced all his Tariffs, causing a sharp drop in people's retirement savings and economic forecasts to worry about a recession.

Meaning the reserve bank of Australia began to cut interest rates. The polling literally did a 180, and by the end of the brief election campaign, the Liberal party was cut back to a single gangrenous foot representing almost entirely rural seats in Queensland the Alabama/Mississippi of Australia. 

So the UK Keir Starmer labour government has basically previewed what is now happening in Australia. The UK elections were 2024 where wherever you were in the world an incumbent got ousted, UK changed the Tories for Labour, the US changed Dems for Republicans. 

It was all interest rates, cost of living. In 2025 interest rates began to fall, and so an incumbent could hold on in Australia. Credit needs to be extended however, to the US who switched parties from a serious but ineffective party, to the clown party. The UK did not do this even though they've had a bunch of blunders and scandals, it is nothing compared to the succession of debacles and shit sandwiches and dumpster fires that have been the actions of the Trump Whitehouse, I mean they pretty much can't even be called a government.

Pauline Hanson, is closer to a clown like Trump however, than someone merely ineffective like Keir.

The Gary's Economics Dichotomy is I fell, right

The democratic moment we are living through, have been living through is basically some threshold being crossed likely in 2008, the GFC. That was the end of the economic paradigm people could tolerate because they were invested in riding speculative bubbles.

After 2008, there's been a demand for change growing, that legacy political parties answer in one of two ways - 

1. Ignoring the call, kicking the can up the road, trying to keep the old mule wheezing on a bit longer.

2. Blaming immigrants.

Neither of these will address the underlying issue. The problem is, one of them obviously isn't going to address the issue, and the other looks like it is addressing the issue.

Gary Stevenson, a youtube celebrity, former Citibank trader and campaigner for an undefined wealth tax, says that the dichotomy we face is: tax the rich, or blame immigrants. 

I believe he is fundamentally right.

The thing is, the UK government, the Labour Party, just will not tax the rich, so they are doing the kick the can up the road, doubling down on neoliberalism.

Tragically Australia is doing something about cost of living. There's a couple of problems though - the Labour party (Australia) recently declared its intentions to grandfather out Capital Gains Tax concessions, and Negative Gearing.

This is in terms of results exactly the kind of change democratic voters actually have been demanding since 2008. People forget that the GFC ultimately had its roots in housing market speculation, it was so bad because the doubling down reached the stage where the US property market had been inflated up to the point that to get people to buy useless houses in nowherevilles across the nation, they had to get promotional interest rates on mortgage loans with no documentation of their incomes and jobs (NINJA loans) and to feel safe in doing such a financially reckless thing, by knowing they could just mail back the keys and walk away from the debt at any time.

Basically, one of the best ways to attack the growing wealth inequality is to shut down "investment" in residential housing. 

The Labour government took some unpopular but long overdue steps in the direction of becoming merely as bad as countries like the UK and Canada and US already are.

Australia's tax code was, and is, to be blunt, fucking suicidal. People are basically forced to mortgage themselves up to the eyeballs and speculate on their own homes, by the tax code. They have to outbid dentists who can deduct mortgage repayments on an empty second home, from their income tax via negative gearing.

There is another thing that Gary is fundamentally right about, which is, the media are going to amplify the story that everything costs too much because immigration is too high, it's not going to work, and here is the fundamental part - things don't cost too much because of immigration.

So the US is in this one dimension, ahead of the game - the Trump administration smoked a bunch of ICE possibly injected ICE into the tips of their penis. It hasn't worked at all, and doesn't work and we know this because immigration went down and deportations went up under both the Obama and Biden administrations. The same is true of the Labour party under Starmer in the UK, they've got the immigration down, they've stopped the arrivals by boats.

The fundamental problem is that the economy is too complicated for voters to understand, nobody explains to them the counter intuitive shit that is FUCKING BORING it is so well determined - like if you cut government spending the economy will shrink - voters don't understand that money the government spends becomes someone else's income, so austerity is like implementing an economic recession. They don't understand that immigration can help lower the cost of living, not raise it, by filling gaps in the job market and reducing the cost of services, bringing in workers to support an otherwise ageing population.

Instead in the case of austerity, people make a false analogy between the government and an individual "If I'm in debt I need to live within my means and tighten my belt." 

And in the case of turning anti-immigrant, they don't see it as someone running up to help you push your stalled car, they see it as more people turning up to their job interviews, to their auctions, to their kids track meets. They just see immigration as more competition, so they experience the government basically saying "we know times are tough right now, so we thought you could use more pressure."

Non-Multicultural Voting

Earlier this year, King Chuckles went to the US and made a speech to Congress that was essentially a comedy roast of Trump. He gifted Trump a bell and lectured the people of the US about liberty and democracy. Shortly after Chucky's visit, Trump went to visit Xi in China, Xi gave him a packet of rose seeds and said something like "I heard your Whitehouse Garden got a bit messed up." 

The world is basically laughing at Trump now, and have switched from sycophancy giving him gold baubles like he is a great and powerful dragon, to giving him jokes.

It was very apparent in the US, going back to 2016, that the voters' egocentricity in electing Trump meant that while they voted for who they wanted and got a nice 'fuck you' off to the US citizens who very much didn't want Trump; they were also electing an ambassador to the world. So it is one thing to troll the half of the nation that looks down on you, it doesn't really work when you have to send your embarassment out onto the world stage to talk to serious people, however you feel about their ideologies, policies and cultures like Xi, like King Charles, like Keir Starmer, Angela Merkle, AMLO and Claudia Sheinbaum, like Putin, like Trudeau and Carney etc. etc.

Pauline Hanson is even less serious than Trump. As Destiny said "I love my mom but she'd make a terrible fucking president" or something to that effect, Pauline Hanson is, in the most derogatory way, somebody's mum. Seriously, you could go to any public primary school, and find someone who is as qualified to go out there on the world stage and represent to very serious people as Pauline Hanson.

Again, to lean on Destiny, he has this standing challenge, for anyone ever to find a single video of Trump where somebody would be like "man, that dude really knows what he's talking about." A beguiling, fascinating challenge that should make you go "aha!" to think that Trump has never once uttered anything that sounded like anything approaching expertise on any subject.

I think Pauline might be better on that front, like she writes speeches and reads them, can pronounce a word like 'divisive' but she's in tallest pygmy territory, and she is certainly too advanced in age for anybody to reasonably expect her to step up and have serious energy policies, serious tax policy, even serious immigration policy.

Conclusion

I actually don't think Australia is a particularly racist country. I've lived in other countries, I have access to the internet. It certainly has a violent history where the indigenous were dispossessed and then ignored and vilified while continuing to exist as best they could in the superimposed nation state. It certainly has overtly racist and discriminatory policy in its past, like the white Australia policy and what not.

But I don't think Australias modal voter wants racial purity and believes the nation exists within the blood of 5+ generation Australians with maybe a bit of Aboriginal or a bit of Greek or Italian or Vietnamese or Hong Kongese or Dutch or German or Philipino or Argentinian or Samoan or Fijian or Vatu or...you get the point, in them.

I think they care about interest rates, and their kids living similar lives to themselves. I think they largely can't connect the appreciation in the value of the home they are paying off, with the fact that they are somehow going backwards in quality of life because the maths is too counterintuitive.

That a One Nation lead Australian government would not succeed in any way shape or form of making any of their constituents lives better, is one of the easiest predictions to make.

The shame is, on a greater set of shoulders that sets the editorial tone of public discourse. Australia is, for example, one of the places making strides on opening up the conversation on our housing policy, and allowing the public to hear voices explain the drawbacks of negative gearing, and giving capital gains tax discounts to real estate sales that are not given to shares or other productive investments.

Australia remains a media silo where I don't think you will ever hear anyone say "The housing affordability crisis is because of investment."

The relatively good and decent government we have right now, is trying to address this on the downlow, because Australia the nation, is not emotionally mature enough to be spoken to like adults, and we don't really have any voices both large and independent enough, to begin the tantrums and the sobbings and get us to where we can restructure our tax code to make people pay for what they take, and not for what they make.