Tag: coronavirus

Gratitude in the Time of a Pandemic: Melburnian and Indigenous Solidarity during Coronavirus

We communicated quickly and openly, we locked down ahead of everyone else, we ensured that holistic well-being was the centre of our responses and we treated ourselves with a dignity that we are not subject to in other areas of our Indigenous lives.

­­Viral Economics: Lessons from the Second Wave

It is worth pausing to ask: what do these weak points in pandemic control—hotel security, meatpacking, and aged care—have in common? The answer is obvious: underpaid, under-trained, undervalued and under-protected workers, all belonging to privatised, casualised industries where workers with few rights and fewer benefits are forced to choose between following the rules to a tee or putting tea on the table.

Kettling for COVID: Police and protest in Melbourne

…police forces everywhere have been militarising their equipment, procedures and general outlook. They have been taking on the strategies of special operations forces, influenced by discourses of terrorism, learning new and terrifying tactics…

Plagued by Chaos: An Inside View on the Anti-lockdown Protests

Arena Online

Scobie M

22 Oct 2020

As lockdown restrictions slowly ease, a peruse of the encrypted networks used by anti-lockdown protesters reveals the extent to which confused allegiances and conspiracy theories have plagued the movement.

The coming COVID science sh*tstorm: responding to the Great Barrington Declaration

‘Not again’ will be the first thought of many climate-change veterans. They will recognise in the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) echoes of the dispiriting and distracting climate-science wars. Released on 7 October, the declaration is a brief statement promoted by three eminent epidemiologists. It is highly critical of lockdown approaches to tackling COVID-19 and argues […]

The Toxic Business as usual Budget will be no elixer for rapid COVID-induced economic decline

The government has baulked at a desperately needed and once-in-a-generation chance to structurally change the Australian economy to make it more sustainable, greener and fairer.

Childhood masked

Childhood has contracted to the home in this plague year, shrinking radically to the family within the home.

Government abandons the arts: what’s to be done?

Rather than an organic ‘culture’ with its own shared meanings, the arts ‘industry’ is an aggregate of individual interests.

Après moi, le déluge: Artists after Art

The ‘artist’ is no longer simply an individual maker, an avant-garde visionary, a person exploring the specifics and limits of a medium, or indeed any of the other familiar figures of aesthetic modernity. Instead, the ‘artist’ is marked out by their success at doing exactly what late capitalism demands; that is, everything, and in a flagrantly vacuous way.

Suicide spikes and moral panic

…the modelling of potential suicides uses some of the actual experience of unemployment and suicide to underscore its figures, but it completely omits the sociological and historical understanding of a community’s reaction to a major social event such as a war or pandemic.

Planed Flat – Victoria, Stage 4: Is the new model barmy?

Yet the lockdown may be a product of the very assumptions classical liberals draw on for their one-dimensional idea of ‘freedom’.

Eudaimonia: meditations on pandemic life

…just like becoming a parent, there is profound potentiality in the metamorphosis the coronavirus is forcing upon us. I faintly perceive that there is radical possibility in the question we are called to answer: what will we build in place of our old lives?