Jara

Presume you're talking about Bombers. What a moving story, of triumph over adversity, the whole world against them, ASADA, Caro. What heroes. And didn't they deserve that No. 1 draft pick? Make me sick, that lot.

I thought you were proposing we act uncivilly - in your second last paragraph - on closer inspection, I suppose you mean the end of what you describe as "idiotic, well-meaning cowardly" civility? Where on earth do you get the idea that I'm claiming Australians are responsible for the attack? I hate anything to do with fundamentalism of any description, and would support a much tougher system of punishment than we have now - e.g. retrospective laws to cover people who've trained with ISIS, making the reading of their on-line material or spreading their ideas a crime, flexible jail sentences (i.e. you don't get out until the threat has faded), making people stay here for ten years before they can claim citizenship, etc My only concern is that - if there's - what? a hundred or so people convicted (or at least charged) with supporting terrorism - what do we do with the 449, 900 who haven't been? I've got Muslim friends who are much more anti-fundamentalist than I am, who support harsher penalties, etc. In the end, all we can try to do is get along. Also, re your comment about shared responsibility - do you think that our invasion of Iraq might have had something to do with the resentment many Muslims feel towards the West? Afghanistan I kind of understand, since they were harbouring Bin Laden, although I think it was stupid, because nobody invades Afghanistan and gets away with it. But Iraq? Sadam hated the fundamentalists more than we do. Bush was an idiot and Howard was a suck-hole.

Biff - I doubt whether the fall of the Age has got much to do with its political stance - it's more the transfer of the advertising dollar to unregulated on-line sites. The ultimate effect (as with Uber, Airbnb, etc) is further inequality, decline of wages, etc.

If there's 400,000 of them here, and we behave uncivilly towards them, how many more young men do you estimate would be radicalized?

Just for want of something better to do, I looked up a Muslim hate preacher named Anjem Choudary - currently in jail, thank god - on YouTube. He's all over it - stacks of posts of him preaching his vile message. Good that he's in jail. Whoever owns you tube (and Facebook) should be there with him.

McKenzie and Baker: brilliant. The best investigative journalists in the country. Hundreds of stories over the past few years. So much more than anybody else: the Herald Sun, the moron's choice, licking the boots of the bosses. The demise of proper journalism is a threat to us all. The reason for the demise, of course, is the rise of Google, Facebook, et. al and their hoovering up of the advertisers' money. A couple of years ago I met an editor who'd worked at The New Yorker. Told me when she started out, she was employed as a fact-checker. She was one of seventeen. Imagine that: seventeen people at one magazine whose sole task was to confirm the veracity of every bit of information in the magazine. What do we have now? That smarmy little bastard Zuckerberg who is happy to allow his crappy network to publish anything - anything! terrorists' propaganda, violence, paedophilia, - as long as the advertisers keep shovelling him the dough. They're one of the reasons we have a problem with the Jihadis. Won't even hand over the details of terrorists to the security forces because it threatens their income (of course they're happy to sell your most intimate details to marketing companies). The long-term implications are frightful. The death of truth, the rise of scum, growing ignorance, division, hatred and chaos.

Re your first point: say what? Re your second point - You have? I don't think you stated it that clearly. I must have misunderstood. You're asking me how global warming theory could be falsified? Lots of ways, I imagine. Thousands of socialist scientists fudging the figures to .... further their careers, or whatever rubbish somebody else said back there. A Chinese conspiracy, like Trump says. All of their computers or calculations could be skewif. Lots of ways. Anything can be falsified, of course. Maybe we didn't land on the moon, maybe the Albanians shot Kennedy, maybe God planted the fossils to fool Darwin, maybe I'm a butterfly dreaming I'm a Demons supporter. Don't quite get why you're asking.

Yes, I know - in the eighties, they were warning us about a nuclear winter. Still a possibility, of course.

Yep,no worries, sorry - this isn't exactly an academic setting, so I didn't put in references, but I got the figure from a writer called Stephen Pyne - the book was called "Burning Bush" - a fire history of Australia - if such things interest you, you should read it - it's an extraordinary work (he's written a series of books on the role of fire in forming the environments of every continent - to my eye, he's one of the most important scientists/writers alive) I haven't read the book for a few years, but, from memory, he was talking about the general warming of the Australian continent, from its rainforest days to the rise and domination of the eucalypts - process took about 80,000 years. Yes, of course, there have been all sorts of natural fluctuations in climate - ice ages, mini-ice ages etc - one book I read pointed out that we have had a period of 15,000 years of relative warmth - which, of course, fostered the growth of that little thing - civilisation. Who knows? - maybe there's about to be a planetary wobble and we're heading for another ice age. But that's a bit of a different thing from the current concerns about Global Warming - the worry there is the speed with which it's occurring, and the danger that the rapid warming will cause terrible problems for our environment - affect agriculture, Great Barrier Reef, coastal communities, etc... I pray that the scientists are wrong - but I don't like to gamble with my kids' future - like I said back there, I met a few of those scientists for a book I was working on - they certainly didn't strike me as people who'd lie to save their careers - on the contrary, they were kind of nerdy types who were fanatical about making sure that their figures were accurate - I take the standard environmentalist argument: if I'm wrong, the worst that can happen is that we reduce pollution. If the deniers are wrong, the worst that can happen is that our environment becomes uninhabitable.

Er - what's "everything"?

Earl - one thing in your reply I take issue with - you say climate change is a natural phenomenon - yes, it is, of course: in the last 80,000 years Australia's climate has got hotter and drier as it drifted towards the equator (and as Aboriginal people introduced a regime of burning which favoured pyrophiliac plants, which reinforced the process) - but it doesn't change at the speed it has since industrialisation - the last warming took 80,000 years - the current one has taken a hundred - that's why most of the scientists I met believed it was man-made.

Well, no, I presume climate scientists are like the rest of us. They have careers, sure. I spent a lot of time with scientists (a couple of fire scientists, but also climate scientists, physicists, et al) for a book I was writing a few years ago. I thought they were an eminently sensible and very admirable bunch. Certainly not the sort of people who would falsify evidence to protect their careers. The trouble was, that being scientists (as opposed to spin meisters for big business) they tended not to speak in certainties. Rather they talked of possibilities, balance of probabilities, etc. This left them open to attack from the spin meisters, who would say: Prove it! (The same thing happened with tobacco companies). These scientists generally seemed convinced that the climate was heating up in ways that concerned them. I remember one of them casually commenting something along the lines of: "Sure, the climate has always changed, but not at the rate it's been changing for the past fifty years."

Huh? Sorry - bit too subtle for me. Need to unpack that a bit more. Falsifiable? I don't get it. Isn't just about everything falsifiable? The report on the dangerous building and the reports on the dangerous climate change - they can all be falsified if you're clever enough. Must be bed time for me - not sure what you're saying.

I thought (not certain) I heard Dastyari describe himself as an atheist. Doesnt everybody go on q and a to promote themselves? He probably just annoys you more because he expresses views opposed to yours and he tends to express them rather well (I find him a bit annoying myself - bit full of himself, and he lost me after that China thing)

Why "Lefty"? Immigration has been supported by both parties for decades. If anything, the right-wing parties - the parties of big business - support it more because it enables them to keep wages down while the profits go up. Comment about Dastyari a bit below the belt.

Why do you listen to the expert who tells you the building is about to collapse and not to the thousands of experts - the leaders in their profession - who tell us that our years of pumping crap into the atmosphere is having an effect on the climate that could harm us all in the long run? I'll tell you why: in the case of the first expert, the solution requires very little effort. All you have to do is go outside. With the second set of experts, heeding their warning comes at a cost. We have to change our way of living. It requires effort. It also threatens the short-term profits of the people who own the system, who are consequently happy to put out all sorts of disinformation.

What do you mean by "naturally occurring"? Sure, we've always had bush fires, but never of that severity. I don't just mean because of the death rate - obviously that was affected by population growth and settlement patterns. I mean because of its speed, severity, spotting rates. Might just be a coincidence, sure. Might not be. If an expert tells me the building me and my family are sitting in might be about to collapse, I don't say, "Well, it might not." I get out.

Where's the lack of logic? I didn't say that there was definite, irrefutable evidence that that particular event was caused by global warming. I said it was my belief; that belief is based upon many years of a) being a firefighter, and b) researching and writing about fire and its role in the Australian environment. Climate scientists predict that the number of "blow-up days" will increase dramatically, depending upon where you are (further inland worse - e.g. Canberra predicted to double by 2050). The climate is definitely warming, and we are breaking all sorts of records. Black Saturday, for example, a result of the worst drought in recorded history. The fire itself broke records: for example, spotting at a distance of 35 kilometres. Another example: I was at a shocking fire in Lancefield a year or two ago - the experts told us it wouldn't be bad, because it was early October. When we got there it was terrible. Sydney fires a few years ago: same thing. Abbott assured us that it was "all part of our natural cycle". Er - not in early October, it's not. These things are happening now, but because of the boiling-frog effect, we don't notice. As Bolt etc say, you can't "prove" that any particular event was due to global warming. Could just be a coincidence. Hell of a coincidence: worst fire coming at the end of the worst drought at the end of the hottest decade for thousands of years.

Seen any bush fires lately? 2009. Worst in recorded history. Scared the crap out of me. Killed heaps of people I knew. Global warming? I suppose the creepy Andrew Blot would just smirk and say: "Prove it."

I spent a couple of weeks there - 25 years ago, alas, but what a place - magnificent. Food was brilliant. Even got to meet the Dalai Lama.

I've got a few Aboriginal friends who wouldn't agree with your last remark. As for the rest, would have been much better to let Saddam stay in power. American imperialism at its worst (with lapdog us).

Biff surely the current problems in Iraq were?

You and I often disagree on such matters, Biff, but on most of your comments here, I'm in complete agreement. Can't believe how soft we are on potential terrorists. That fruitcake responsible for the Lindt café should have been in jail, as should have the Manchester madman. I'm as liberal and progressive as they come on most matters, and I'm very supportive of the 99.9% of local Muslims who want peace as much as I do, but it should be against the law to make favourable comments about a group of homicidal maniacs like Isis, or to wave their flags about. It should also be against the law to even look at their material on line - sounds difficult to police, I suppose, but we do it for paedophile material, we should do the same for them. Many of my Muslim friends feel just as strongly as I do. I also think Mark Zuckerberg should be charged as an accessory - incredible how Facebook will sell your most intimate details to the highest bidder, and yet they refuse to co-operate with security forces or stop killers spreading their vile propaganda.

The people who did this were obviously monsters - great if they could be killed - but it's best not to exaggerate - unless I misread the reports, or there's been an update I missed, I thought it said 29 "people" - two children among them. I know anybody dying like this is a tragedy, but saying they were all schoolgirls somehow makes it seem worse.

I hate it how Waleed tosses out another article every time there's an Islamist atrocity. What I don't like is how he defends the indefensible. Or I think he does - usually he writes these massive essays and I read it and think - er- what did he actually say there? Guy's won Walkelys and all sorts of awards, but I reckon he's a pretty poor writer. Good television host. I imagine Muslims come here for the same reasons everybody else does: it's peaceful and wealthy. Dunno how many people get killed by falling fridges, but there's been three people killed by Islamic terrorists in this country, as far as I can recall. Lots in Bali, of course. Given that there's - what? about 400,000 Muslims living here, surely the only thing we can do is try to get along. I've worked in international education for years, have had hundreds of Muslim friends, colleagues and students - never met one I wouldn't welcome into my home. Funny, the ones I admire most are the niqab-wearing women from Saudi Arabia - coming here is a revelation for them - most of them are very brave pioneers, happy to relate to lots of different cultures, and when they return to their own country, from what I've gathered, they are a very positive force for change (i.e. women's rights, votes, right to drive, etc. ) Long way to go, of course - starting from a low base, but you have to start somewhere.