Tarryn Phillips is a medical anthropologist and associate professor of crime, justice and legal studies in La Trobe University’s department of social inquiry. Danielle Couch is a public health researcher, health sociologist and adjunct senior research fellow at Monash Rural Health. Carmen Vargas is a research fellow at Deakin University’s school of health and social development
So, the argument:
In addition to creating “villains”, crisis narratives also cast “heroes” and “victims” in misleading ways. While in-store shoppers were vilified during Covid-19, Australia’s supermarket giants were positioned as either innocent victims or as virtuous “heroes” saving the day. This framing deflected attention from the role of these large institutions in monopolising the industry and shaping (and profiting from) the scarcity.
….
And, as the cost of living continues to increase, it is understandable that those already living on the edge may feel a need to buy extra petrol now before the price goes up. By portraying individual “hoarders” as the problem, attention shifts away from corporate profiteering, bad policy decisions and crisis management failures.
It’s the system, innit!
As Australians stock up on jerry cans amid fears of oil shortages due to war in the Middle East and politicians label such behaviour as “un-Australian”, a familiar blame game is taking place.
But pointing the finger at “panic buyers” misses the point, obscures the real problems and can make matters worse. We can learn a lot from the way we handled – and mishandled – the Covid-19 toilet paper crisis.
This from “public health” specialists.
It’s because we live in a capitalist, corporate dominated, economy that people panic buy. Apparently.
The morons have clearly never considered what happens in a socialist economy when there’s supply. And, having lived there and done that, what we call panic buying here and now pales in comparison.
This whole idea is simply moronic. Close the universities.
Indeed supermarkets (and small shops) were heroes of the covid years. Universities not so much, closing down and cheating their fee-paying students. Apparently checkout girls were immune from infection because they were in general lower-class. Working people stepped up, our betters were not to be seen.
And then there’s toilet paper. Instructions in the UK were, if you had symptoms, self-isoale immediatly at home. You can stretch out the food in the fridge and freezer but you need toilet papper. Buy two-week’s supply once. I did that before the sensible-provision buying began. No panic, sense.
The food delivery people should have been dying like flies, but they weren’t.
If you skimmed over that, you might be under the impression that these people had some sort of academic expertise, but it is all social ‘sciences’ bullshit and bluster. “department of social inquiry”? Fuck the fuck off and die.
Supermarkets and their staff proved both the superiority of capitalism and the emptiness of the claims of the covid bedwetters and state oppression fans.
As I read it, I noticed a lot of ‘ands.’ I got the impression they are all still trying to find something they can actually do.
They can get paid for poisoning minds. They’re good at that.
WTF is the difference between a “medical anthropologist” and a “health sociologist”?
Dead or alive.
More accurately, past vs present.
AIUI, anthropologists ‘study’ “cultural practices” and “ethnography”. Not dead people, as such. Anyway, ‘medical archaeology’ is a term I could begin to understand; but “medical anthropology” sounds like ‘studying’ the holistic health woo of aborigines…
Traditionally anthropologists went round the fringes of the Empire studying the cultures and social practices of tribal groups. But it could in principle be any kind of social group, and so these days they often study social groups less far from home. A common target is “communities of practice” eg professional communities. So a medical anthropologist might study how doctors and other health workers function. But they might also be interested in health-related behaviour in other social groups, in the same way as an anthropologist of food is interested in consumers’ culinary behaviours and not just in food producers.
The difference with a sociologist is that an anthropologist is generally more interested in looking at how individuals interact (they’ll often spend 6 months embedded in a particular space, these days often a workspace, observing) and trying to understand the culture (often a professional culture). A sociologist is more interested in the big picture stuff like trying to identify social structures, and less interested in the level of individual interactions.
Is a lot of it useless? Yes. A particular warning sign is “autoethnography”, and it’s frankly horrifying so many people get a PhD just for writing one as a thesis. I wouldn’t mind so much if it only formed a chapter of a larger work that also included research of other people, but it’s common to get a PhD these days for what’s little more than blog entries analysing your own life. Have a search around for autoethnography PhD theses, then read and weep.
But some of it can have applications. Studies of how eg airline pilots interact have helped create modern protocols to deal with issues like authority gradients that might impede communication during emergencies. Airbus actually uses a team of anthropologists for this kind of reason, thinking about design factors that can influence flight crew dynamics and behaviour. And this thinking is now being applied in medicine – the “arrogant surgeon” exists and might be doing more harm than the arrogant pilot.
However, anthropologists aren’t alone in contributing to this, psychologists work a lot in these areas too. So I’m not sure what would be lost by shuttering most or all of the departments, since presumably the useful research would find funding and a job in an adjacent faculty. The division of social sciences into their current fields is an arbitrary one anyway, and might not have ended up in its current configuration if you replayed history again. Much of the woo has ended up in the anthropology and sociology departments. It’s not like there are tens of thousands of jobs opening up in anthropology or sociology each year.
The only possible interpretation of any research whatever in the ‘social sciences’ is: some do, some don’t.
Ernest Rutherford (Baron Rutherford of Nelson) 1871-1937
Just different names commies give themselves as camouflage. Other than that, it does not matter.
My question was rhetorical. Yet every leftist lie, distortion, obfuscation etc matters…
To be somewhat fairer to her than I might like to be:
In the actual piece:
OK, ‘Some commentators have argued that the Australian government has systematically reduced its oil refineries’ is an odd way of stating an empirical fact, but this is The Guardian and it’s quite surprising that it even made it in in this form.
Fred Pawle explains the situation in Oz in a bit more detail here.
Who was it who wanted those refineries shut down? Couldn’t have been the Guardian-reading types could it?
GROLIES = Guardian Reader Of Low Intelligence, Ethnic Skirt.
put another L in there and it’s something unpleasant that gets hawked up after the first fag in the morning.
Exactly these silly cows would have been in favour of it.
Exactly why it’s surprising!
In Oz it’s the government that owns the oil refineries? Here in the UK it’s the oil companies that own them.
Who exactly are those ‘panic buyers’ that the left care about so much?
Moreover, as often happens in times of crisis, migrant communities tend to be scapegoated. In the coverage of “panic buying” during Covid-19, the behaviour was regularly referred to as “un-Australian”.Rumours were promulgated in the media by “anonymous sources” that the Chinese community was buying in bulk to sell overseas.
Aha!
I don’t know about selling overseas but I can testify from Hong Kong that the slightest rumour of a shortage leads the Chinese to empty the supermarkets.
I remember going to Costco during lockdown and it was literally all Indians, Pakistanis loading their trollies with toilet paper and soap.
And Africans, and bottled water by the pallet. At least, Chingford Costco is.
Turd world behaviour?
Chinese. Getting on for the world’s highest average IQ. Coincidence?
Following the herd is not necessarily a sign of high IQ – indeed, often (but not always) a sign of the opposite.
China’s current global position technologically and economically -particularly in AI – suggests to me that the collectivist mind-set limits Chinese achievement. Putting it fairly crudely…the US leads in breakthrough R&D, China then rapidly scales and copies technology, and then the EU focuses on regulation, attempting to set global ‘standards’ for ‘safety and privacy’…
Hence:
“America innovates, China replicates, Europe regulates.”
When I lived in Hong Kong we had a “run” on a cake shop, and one on cutlery.
“Department of social inquiry.” It now takes a three year degree course to learn what the Great Generation (me) picked up in the course of an evening out on the town.
Students are presumably taught to inquire:
Can I buy you a drink?
Want to dance?
Want to fuck?
I have, over the years, challenged people to explain what they mean by “profiteering”. No coherent reply has been received. So now I assume it’s merely the mark of a virtue-signalling dimwit.
My village mates are mostly unreflective Green lefties (bar one Saffa, who is extremely sound).
I mentioned the other day that I’d had a chat in the pub with one of them, a nice bloke who works as a ‘tree surgeon’, whose company I enjoy but with whom any political discussion is always difficult.
He said to me that the petrol companies were ‘profiteering’, and weren’t they all massive wankers, and I said I didn’t know what their inputs were so I couldn’t comment on their profits, but that I knew they were generally low.
(I could have added, but didn’t, that the bulk of the cost of fuel is tax put on to fund the government projects he loves – green bollocks, benefits for scroungers etc.)
I then made the (to us) obvious point that even if was ‘profiteering’ it was, irrespective of their motives, desirable, because reducing usage of a vital commodity at a time of sudden restriction of supply was a good thing, because it meant that it was more likely we’d still have fuel for ambulances etc, whereas if people continued using at their usual rates the dwindling supplies would soon be gone.
He didn’t like this argument.
Anyway, yesterday I asked him if he could supply me with logs. Normally he fills my store for £150, and I was amused by his reply which was yes, he could, but a) that he was busy for the next few days because of a rush of orders and b) the price was going up to £200.
I pointed out the similarity to the fuel companies and he changed the subject.
He sounds to be the sort of fellow whose intellect would improve if you were to whack him over the head with a sturdy branch.
He’s actually a very quick-witted bloke – a demon pub quizzer, and very amusing, not to mention having held quite serious jobs in his past – but he’s been indoctrinated. Simple as that.
Whacking his prices up when there’s high demand seems quite smart to me.
Smart? Any fool can increase prices in response to increased demand or lower supply. What’s smart is to retain customers and remain competitive in a ‘crisis’ by (say): [1] cutting your own costs where possible (eg with logs, nets vs plastic bags vs loose) and [2] add value where possible (eg improving customer service, lowering free delivery threshold on bulk buys, click & collect, bargain mixed loads…)
Agreed, I know of no comprehensive definition of profiteering.
That said, I can think of two examples that I’d class as profiteering – hoarding and price-fixing:
1. Deliberately withholding goods from the market to create an artificial shortage, thereby driving up the price.
2. Collaborative agreements between competitors to keep prices artificially high, eliminating consumer choice.
From experience, the fastest way to empty store shelves is for some gov’t twat to explain that there’s no shortage & people don’t need to stock up on (insert product name here).
Back during the lockdown days we stocked up on things, including toilet paper, when we could. The funniest bit was when people who had no TP were mocking those of us who did: “you morons who are loading up your carts” said the dude wiping his arse with his bare hands.
A Japanese toilet is the way forward. No more TP worries and why wipe when you can wash and blow dry?
The Jappers do lots of things better than us. Plumbing and bathing among them.
Never tried a Jap ‘wash & blow dry’, and in no hurry to do so. But, in extremis, I have simply had a shower…
It’s a bit of an acquired taste, if that’s not quite the metaphor in this case, but you can definitely get used to it.
Easy fix: don’t allow migrant communities. And, please, ditch the PC BS, they are foreign colonies.
Yes, “migrant communities” = foreign colonies = parasitic infestations = invasive species…
Familiar? Yes, an appeal to purity. “No true Scotsman” fallacy.
I think that the answer isn’t to close the Universities en bloc, but to shut the departments where they tout twaddle. In the Gents where I worked, many of the toilet roll holders ere graffittied with ‘Social Science Degrees – please take one’.
As for the price of petrol and diesel, who is the biggest profiteer? The Government, of course. The diesel went up 20p per litre near me, and that’s 11p extra for the Government who have done fuck all, whereas the 9p has to be split between all sorts of folks. Some crassly stupid Labour bint on GB News today was moaning that Government intervention would be paying out to subsidise Rod Stewart and Elton John, but why it never dawned on the brain-dead moron that the biggest help any Government could do would be to cap the tax take, I simply don’t know. Government ‘subsidies’ pay back a fraction of what they take, because the money transfer mechanism isn’t efficient – it wouldn’t surprise me if the Starmer government doesn’t welcome the fuel price rise because it increases the tax they cream off to pay to their cronies at the same time as helping Millibrain feed his masturbation fantasies.
Libtard professors tout twaddle in every department. It’s not the subjects; it’s the professors.
Bloody Hell. That 20p went up to 40. That’s 22p extra to Starmer & Co.
You don’t get many libtards doing engineering. Well, OK, some. But nowhere as many as in the ‘Social(ist) Sciences’ – which aren’t Science at all.