Hi All, About a year ago I published a couple of videos on the impending Australian TikTok ban. I only published two out of the four videos because there was so little engagement (which speaks either to the possibility that, a: Yours Truly is a crap content creator or, b: the reality that most of us are posting into such a vast ocean of content, it is virtually impossible to be heard or seen these days. You be the judge :)!). Nevertheless I’ve decided to press on and rerelease the original two and upload the second two in the context of the Australian governments looming under (and over)16’s social media ban/ online safety bill which takes effect in December this year, as well as various tranches of recent legislation designed to shepherd, massage, gatekeep and control our ability to have a free and authentic internet. I’m extermently concerned about the government legislative trend that is taking over the anglosphere to censor and gatekeep the internet. I was taught as a Social Worker to resist institutional and organisational oppression as well as oppression that affects people on an individual scale and as such I’m very much against the government trying to gatekeep, firewall, and withhold the free flow of information in the digital space, regardless of the Trojan horse justifications they decide will be most effective at ‘selling’ it to the public (keeping kids safe!?). Keeping kids safe is an important but seperate issue which ultimately should have nothing to do with restricting adult access to the incredible potential of the World Wide Web (this seems likely to be the shadow agenda of all this recent legislation and policy, imho). The videos speak to the period we live in right now, the consequences and promise of the internet, the ‘Gutenberg press 2.0’, will likely be orders of magnitude more consequential than the original Gutenberg press which heralded enormous human flourishing, spread literature and ideas and undergirded the Renaissance and the Reformation. It also undermined state and religious control, corruption and authoritarianism. What makes us think that the same would not be happening in our age? A free and uncensored internet is extremently threatening to potentially corrupt or secretive powers and institutions of our society that would like to control what we see, read, hear and know, and do not want us to know what they may be doing in our name. By their actions we should know them. We should resist any organisational or institutional attempts to censor the internet. We have about six months, Australia.

Part IV final part.

Here’s Pt III

Here’s Part II

Hi guys this is the first part of what I think is a three part series I was working on a few years ago about the Australian Govt proposed TikTok ban. The ban didn’t eventuate but the govt was hellbent on its larger agenda of authoritarian censorship and control of the internet and to that end they’ve slammed through an obnoxious an unconsultative ‘under 16’s social media ban’ in the dead of night which will take effect at the end of 2025. I think many of the issues raised are widely relevant (not just to TikTok) and I hope you do too! Cheers.

It’s almost impossible in the current era for a doctor to practice in the centralised medical system and not betray their Hippocratic oath. Why do we tolerate this?

A patient should know that a doctor is doing everything they possibly can to help them. Additionally no one and nothing should ever get between the doctor and patient relationship. Centralised medicine, corporate medicine erodes these sacred tenets.

Jung reflected that organised religion makes it basically impossible to have a direct experience of god. We seem to be in the middle of a similar process with much of psychology, counselling and therapy.

In the age of smartphones, we could have twenty referendums every day, easily and with minimal fuss. The population could vote on legislation in real time. We don’t need legislative assemblies anymore for true democracy.

Martial arts is perhaps the greatest form of ‘shadow work’ processing ever invented.